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Welcome! Good morning, everybody. I was on the Jim Polito show this morning and spoke with Steve Fourni who was sitting in for Jim.  We discussed what happened this week with the DOJ and Online shopping scams, some run by ISIS -- yes that ISIS.  Then we discussed a new technology that can change rural internet forever.  SpaceX Starlink. Here we go with Steve. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com ---  Automated Machine Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Craig Peterson: It's pretty obvious when you're reading that this is a generic review that is not mentioning any of the features that you might be looking for in that product. Hey, Just when you thought it was not safe to shop online, it turns out yeah. It really wasn't safe to shop online and it still isn't. Oh my gosh. Now the terrorists are in on the PPE thing. Craig Peterson here, and I was on this morning on Mr. Jim Polito show. Steve Fourni. I was sitting in for him and we had some fun discussions. Here we go. [00:00:39] Steve Fourni: It's Steve Fourni in for Jim this morning and you know what that music means? We do it at this time. Every Tuesday. Here we go to our favorite Canadian, our good friend, Craig Peterson, with all the information. Good morning, Craig. How are you, sir? [00:00:52] Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning. I guess that's my cue. [00:00:55] Steve Fourni: Yeah, that's the best I got. I can give you a more elongated intro, but I'd rather people hear from you. Not me, you know what I mean?  It's funny, we've heard about the PPE scams. We've heard about the stimulus check scams. Never let a good scam go by without ISIS getting involved. Craig, what's the latest on that? [00:01:14] Craig Peterson: Isn't that the weirdest thing ever. ISIS of all groups. Yeah, they've gotten in on this big time and that you can go to the website right now, facemaskcenter.com. You're going to see a seizure warning. The justice department has been tracking what's been going on. Apparently our friends at ISIS have been selling, all kinds of personal protective equipment, like masks Tyvec suits, the goggles, the face shields, et cetera. Apparently some of these scams sites and maybe also including this ISIS site, but they'll ship a substantially inferior products. California ordered a bunch, Governor Newsom out there from China, through a friend of his, kickbacks, you gotta make sure you're doing that if you're in government. They were all substandard and they are showing up all over the dark web. Now, in the case of ISIS, apparently, they were not shipping products. So we've got millions of people who are desperate for these protective pieces of equipment. And they were. Sending money to ISIS. It's just absolutely amazing. So the FBI department of justice has shot these particular sites down right now. We've got to be very careful when we're online looking for some of this stuff. Pay attention when you're shopping online, go to a site that's well known.  I like Amazon in many ways. I use it all the time. You can look at the ratings, although there are obviously people who are putting fake ratings up. They actually pay people to put a fake positive rating. If you see something where there are 500 right positive ratings, it's probably legit. I've had to turn to eBay. Do you know Steve? I have chickens and I also am a beekeeper. Did you know that? [00:03:11] Steve Fourni: I didn't. That's good. That's interesting information. [00:03:16] Craig Peterson: When I'm taking care of my bees, for the first year I didn't even wear it and he loves it all.  Usually, you only get stung if you grab a bee right. They're not going to really bother you except in the fall when they start getting more aggressive protecting their honey. I use some heavy surgical gloves, these really great gloves. I love them. They are extra thick and extra long so they go over my beekeeper's suit on the arm and I have had a devil of a time trying to find them, but I did find them on eBay. Somebody still had some, the prices a little higher than it used to be, but not that much higher, maybe a buck or two. I've been looking for them for months.  I'm, I know I'm not alone. Obviously I'm not a doctor or practicing medicine anymore. The bottom line. It's hard to find this stuff. If you go to eBay, what I do is check the ratings. eBay's great about that. This guy had over a half a million ratings, and he had five stars on average, like 4.9 something. So I felt safe buying from him and pretty sure that it wasn't ISIS that was involved. Then I tracked the package as it was being shipped. [00:04:32] Steve Fourni: We're talking with Craig Peterson and yeah, eBay's one that I don't spend too much time on. and again, I bought some stuff on Amazon that, it took four weeks to get here and then you get it and it's basically just a hunk of junk. And you're looking at it's like made in China or whatever. So are there things, like oftentimes I'll go to the product description and even everybody says, buy American and when you're buying stuff online, a lot of times you can't really see that information. Are there places that you mentioned reviews and stuff, but is there stuff in the description may be that people should be looking for when they're buying stuff online? To know that it's legitimate. Are there like keywords we should be looking for or anything like that? [00:05:07] Craig Peterson: Yeah, absolutely. when you're looking at these reviews that people are posting, it's usually a dead giveaway if the grammar is poor. Now, if you flunked out first grade English, maybe you're going to have a hard time with that. If you see a lot of reviews, sometimes 50 reviews or a hundred, and I did a whole show on this at one point, that is just terribly written. Or it's pretty obvious when you're reading, but this is a generic review that is not mentioning any of the features that you might be looking for in that product. It's probably fake. So there's a couple of tips to look for when you are looking at those reviews. [00:05:49] Steve Fourni: Interesting. We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru and good stuff, especially when you're buying, whatever that whatever the hot product is. In this case, unfortunately, it's PPE. But when you're trying to buy the same thing, everybody else is buying. That's really the time that you really need to keep that antenna up. [00:06:05] Craig Peterson: Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely. they're massive volume of all these illegitimate materials it's being sold, never delivered. The fact is that in this case, ISIS decided to get on the business and making some money and using it for terrorism. [00:06:22] Steve Fourni: Oh boy, that's unfortunate. Craigo, let's switch gears here a little bit and talk about SpaceX. what is the latest stuff going on with SpaceX? [00:06:31] Craig Peterson: Oh, this is so cool. SpaceX Elon Musk has got a bunch of businesses going. Their stock is up and down. They had some good news this last week, but what we didn't talk about right now is Starlink. SpaceX got a license to put thousands of satellites up into orbit and they just launched some more. They launched 58 of them this last weekend. Isn't that amazing. So right now, Starlink has about 540 satellites in orbit. What's happening is that SpaceX is setting up what's called a constellation of satellites. These satellites are all orbiting the earth. Trying to cover the entire earth. It is going to give you, they say eventually here, gigabit internet anywhere in the world, which is just amazing. Now, here's cool news for us here in the Northeast. That is that SpaceX is looking for beta testers, and they're going to have two different rounds of beta testing. If you are living in rural, anywhere in Mass in Vermont, and anywhere up here in the Northeast and Connecticut, Rhode Island. They are looking for you because that's right now where this first part of the constellation is aimed. You can get what right now looks like it's about 50 megabits, 500 hundred bits worth of speed. Now, if you've got cable, I've got three gigabits to go to my house, but I'm not normal. 50 megabits that is a joke to me, but if you're in a rural area, Steve, people are really just striving to get any internet, very slow internet in many places. There are two things they're going to help you out with that. One is five G if it comes to your area. But it's not going to come to many rural areas in reality. Right now has the best coverage and you can use that event surely here in place of your cable or your telephone internet. Now with Starlink, you can go to their website and they're charging Steve. I hope you're sitting down, the first month is a dollar for 50 megabits. Then it doubles every month after that. If you can believe that it goes to $2 a month after that for 50 megabits. It's phenomenal. So here's the trick. They're looking for beta testers and that they want them in different areas here in the Northeast. And, you can maybe get it. There are no guarantees at all, but where you want to go online and apply is to go right now to starlink.com. I've registered for this as well because I want to see what's happening, but they will provide you with a satellite dish that takes you about 20 minutes to mount give or take. They have lip mounts. They have roof mounts. They have mounts to put into your lawn. It's just a pole with the satellite dish on top. These are small dishes. It's not like the big old KU, K band stuff that I used to have.  You can install it yourself. It's included in that dollar and, now you're often running. So this is so cool. When they're done with this, which is probably next year. You're going to be able to get inexpensive internet, certainly throughout the Northeast US, and eventually around the world. [00:10:12] Steve Fourni: I hope they get that information to the people of a rural Vermont, via telegram. Cause otherwise, they have no internet to even get that. In fact, when I go to my, my, I go to my inlaws it's little, cause it was a little like this, you know, A lot of those places like up in Vermont, they like it that way. They're like this might work for them because they're like, how dare you put a cell phone tower in the middle of that beautiful field that nobody's using. So they're very anti, that, so this might actually be a way for them to actually, I don't know, get with the times a little bit, [00:10:46] Craig Peterson: eventually, it'll be gigabit and it's going to be going to go up. That $2 per month fee isn't going to last. [00:10:52] Steve Fourni: Yeah. I figured. and lastly, I guess on this, what is, what do you think that's going to do to the rest of the marketplace? Obviously that's going to affect what Xfinity and Comcast and everybody else's are offering if this thing takes off. [00:11:05] Craig Peterson: Yeah. Look at the Comcast that they've lost a half a million subscribers here recently is that business is dying because they were so greedy. It wasn't just Comcast. It was all of the providers. It was ESPN saying, if you want any of our content, you have to pay for everybody who has cable. That type of mentality is going to kill these companies. So they're starting to cut back. They're starting to unbundle things. I love the competition. The five G as well as the satellite networks, because a SpaceX isn't the only one is really going to bring some of these, prices down. Finally, we had hoped that having online streaming was going to make it happen like that but of course it just hasn't. The competition when it settles in. The FCC under Trump has been really strong on trying to make sure there is competition. It's going to be phenomenal. [00:12:06] Steve Fourni: Hopefully, I can get rid of the house phone that Comcast made me get that somewhere in the basement. That phone number, I don't even know what it is, but you gotta have a landline. Okay. Great, wonderful. Craig. Yeah. What's the best way for people to get more information from you on a regular basis. [00:12:21] Craig Peterson: The best way is to get my newsletter. If you go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe, you're going to be able to get my weekly newsletter that has these stories and so much more. Then also it has the links to my radio show, which you'll hear on Saturdays at 11:00 AM. Right here, the same station. [00:12:39] Steve Fourni: That's great. And make sure you're listening to those links outside of the hours of six to nine, please. Of course. no, just kidding, Craig. we appreciate the time, have yourself a wonderful rest of the day and we'll catch up soon. [00:12:51] Craig Peterson: Take care, Steve. Bye. Bye. [00:12:52] Steve Fourni: Alright, take it easy. Yeah, I'm with Craig. I love competition, especially with the, how long has it been, where we've been handcuffed by our cable provider? ---  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Good morning everybody! I was on with Matt this morning and we had a good discussion about Self-Driving Cars, Adaptive Cruise Control, and what AAA found about their programming logic. Then we got into Tik Tok, WeChat, and Tencent and Why what President Trump's action was absolutely justified.   Let's get into my conversation with Matt on WGAN. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Craig Peterson: Is it going to avoid it by changing lanes? By stopping? What it going to do? In almost all the cases, these cars rear-ended this car slash balloon that was sitting right there in the lane. Hey, good morning, Craig Peterson here. I had a great little interview this morning. I was on WGAN and affiliates AM and FM they're in Maine in Portland. And I having fun with Matt. He actually took a little bit of a different angle on this, this morning. So we talked about what I think is the number one story this week. And we talked about what our friend Matt thinks. The number one story is this week. And, uh, yeah, I opened his eyes. He didn't realize what was really going on with President Trump's executive order about Tik Tok and We Chat. So here we go. [00:01:00] Matt Gagnon: It is Wednesday morning. It is Craig Peterson who joins us now. He is our tech guru and joins us every Wednesday at this time. We appreciate it as always. Craig, how are you this morning, sir? Craig's try it again. Where are you? There you go. There we go. Now I hear from you. Craig Peterson: There's always a button. Matt Gagnon: There is always a button and it's good to have you with us and Craig, you know, I am told, although I'm not certain about this, I am told that you also have a show on Saturday here. Is that true? Craig Peterson: Yeah, I do from one til three on Saturday, and I take a much deeper dive into all of my show notes and the hot topics for the week. And you know, if you get my newsletter, not only do we discuss some of this stuff with Matt, but we get right into it all. Matt Gagnon: Indeed. So Craig, on what's on the top of your mind, here's a, I'm going to approach this a little differently with you usually, because I know you send a, you send the topics every week and we talk about a lot of the things that you're talking about, but what is this. [00:02:00] Stand out the story for you this week, in terms of tech topics, what is the thing that, that burns in your mind about what you said? Yeah, Craig Peterson: Burning a hole here. I think kind of a big one. We've got the obvious things were some real problems with security, but that's kind of almost every week. The one that really gets to me is this article. That's talking about a AAA study. Now everybody knows who AAA is. They are as car folk, right. That you can drive. They used to have trip ticks. I remember making those up and taking the family on vacation. Now they've, they've kind of shifted a little bit, but they were looking at these adaptive cruise controls and basically what most people are calling self-driving car technology. [00:03:00] And there've been some reports of these adaptive cruise control, this self-driving technology, driving people right into the rear of fire trucks, from which, of course, is not a fun thing to hit, of police cars and other things. So basically, they thought they would check it out a little bit, and then he tested a number of different vehicles and the way they tested them as they parked a balloon on the road. A lot like a car and it was designed here now to give the car an object. So you're driving down the road with your adaptive cruise control on that car sitting there. Is it going to avoid it by changing lanes, by stopping? What's it going to do? And in almost all of the cases, these cars are rear-ended this car slash balloon that was sitting right there in the lane. I don't mean like it's two inches into the lane. I mean, it was right in the lane. To me, that is huge news because we have all been looking forward to good automation, which of course isn't here yet, but many of us have these adaptive cruise controls, Matt. [00:04:00] Matt Gagnon: Right. I was going to say, this is already a technology that is in like a lot of Tesla cars and a lot of other places that have this adaptive sort of technology that, uh, that I think Lee makes a lot of people feel. Like if it's in the car and sellable to you right now that it's totally safe and you're fine. And you can, you can just kinda like put it on cruise control almost and let it do the rest. Craig Peterson: Yeah. So, it's not a hundred percent of the time. Some of the cars, like the BMW X7, stopped in one out of three runs and that new Kia Telluride, which is a gorgeous car. I hit the dummy vehicle in all three 30 mile-an-hour runs. The problem appears to be that they have maps of the roads and it doesn't have that map doesn't have everything that's around the road. Of course, the surroundings are changing, and these cars seem to be assuming that if something is fixed. It's probably off of the road. It's probably a road sign except, or et cetera. [00:05:00] And this is where the big arguments coming out now, are we better off having something like LIDAR on our cars, which is giving it a full three-D view. It can figure out if things are moving, where they are. In respect to you. Or go with what Tesla is doing because Elon Musk and Tesla are very heavily reliant on just cameras. So, they don't use a three-D view. Yeah. So, what's going to work best and there still are some radar-based systems. And that's the check really from 10 to 20 years. Matt Gagnon: And those things basically, I mean, they send out like a, almost a Doppler signal to see. Where things are and, and, and basically how physically close they are. And they use, you know, the complex math system and the computers to try to judge the car's speed and angle and whatever, to try to make sure that, of course, it avoids things. It just, it strikes me as weird. That be the way that we want a car that is autonomous in some way to operate. Right. I mean, you want, you know, who cares if a stationary object is a sign or something else if it's on the curb of the road and you're about to run into it. You want a car to see that? I mean, think about it like a kid that's frozen or a deer that's not moving or, I mean, any number of things, right. You want to be able to judge where that thing actually is. [00:06:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah, absolutely. So these adaptive cruise control. If you have it and you want to use it, what it is is good for is keeping you in the lane. What is not good for it appears here from this study is avoiding accidents. By the way, Cadillac's super crew. Was it different than some of these other vehicles they tested from being BMW Ford, Kia and Subaru at its drivers only had to intervene about eight times and 800 miles of driving. So, it was actually pretty good. So, these things are going to get better, but just don't trust the stuff itself. [00:07:00] Matt Gagnon: Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over the world of technology, Craig, it would be remiss of me to not bring up Tik Tok with you here. I know that we've touched on and hovered around this topic a little bit, uh, you know, in previous weeks here, but you know, the president signed that executive order that basically threw the hammer down on the Chinese company. Any part of Tik Tok as it operates in the United States? Um, I guess my question for you is, is twofold. Number one, exactly. How does it work? What, what they're, what that app is doing, and what is the real security concern, and then number two, what do you think of the executive order? I mean, is that the appropriate action to be taking in this regard? Craig Peterson: Yeah, we've got a couple of things we're looking at here. We have WeChat and Tik Tok, which are both equally effective money transactions were banned from these Chinese companies. So it's Bytedance and Tencent. Those are the names of the companies that own those technologies. [00:08:00] Now, we have caught our friends at Tik Tok multiple times now getting information from our phones and stealing information from our phones. Particularly if your phone has been rooted, if you have jailbroken your phone, you have now opened up your phone to all kinds of evil, and we have caught Tik Tok doing that. Tencent, this is really kind of scary here because this is, this is a bad thing for Tencent, but I talked about Tencent on my show a couple of months ago here, because what they were caught doing is putting code into windows operating system that allowed them 100% access to everything on your machine, from your keyboard and mouse. Through every file on your machine. And Tencent said they did that in order to help stop cheating. Tencent has some of the most popular video games in use today in the United States. Tik Tok, of course, which is Bytedance has this wonderful little app. That's very, very addictive. And obviously the Chinese spent a lot of money on it. [00:09:00] Is it worth doing? I can say. Absolutely. Yes. I was so disappointed the owners and CEOs of these big tech companies, testifying, I have personally seen right here, multiple companies throughout New England who are now clients of mine who had. Active Chinese back doors in their systems where the Chinese had stolen their intellectual property. And in some cases, yeah, stolen every penny out of their operating accounts. So, is China a threat? 100%! Is it doing it? I have firsthand knowledge of them doing it in companies that are now my clients. And it puts businesses just completely out of business. Is Tik Tok a threat. Absolutely. The latest thing they were caught doing is capturing everything from your copy buffer. Is Tencent a threat? Are you kidding me having complete control over your computer without your knowledge? So you can play a video game. Yeah, I don't think President Trump went far enough. [00:10:00] Matt Gagnon: There you go. Well, Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time to go over the world of technology as he always does. And of course, as you heard just a few moments ago, he also has a show on Saturdays that you can hear as well. If you want to get any of these topics and so many more in more depth and detail, Craig, we really appreciate it as always. And we'll talk to you again very soon. Craig Peterson: Hey, take care, Matt. Matt Gagnon: Thanks a lot. Alright, so coming up next. Sure. Craig Peterson: Hey, thanks, guys. I appreciate you joining me today. I was spent time yesterday, a few hours with our video guy. We're going to do some more work today. And what I'm trying to do here is put together a bunch of well kind of classes, courses, and stuff. So I think what I'm going to do before really get into this too much is send out an email. [00:11:00] To everybody kind of asking you. So what if you had the opportunity, what would you do? So, uh, or what you'd like me to do here for you? Uh, for instance, you want to become like, uh, my friend Guy who decided after a full career, pretty much he wanted to go into cybersecurity. Cause there are millions of open jobs, even right now there are jobs in cybersecurity, but you have to learn it. So do you want me to teach you guys? More about cybersecurity. So you have more job security and job options. Would you like me to just kind of get you out of a hole that you might be in with your cybersecurity? What do I do? What are the basics? Then give me the basics or something in between. So let me know. [00:12:00] I would love to know. Okay. Cause I really want to help you guys out. It's me M E @craigpeterson.com. So drop me an email. Now I'm going to do a lot of free training as well as some of the paid training. And obviously the free training is going to be kind of long-tail just on some specific narrow topics, but lots of them, cause I don't want to confuse people, but uh, how about a more professional sort of course. So let me know. Again, Craig at Craig peterson.com. Take care, everybody. And we'll be back this weekend. ---  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Good morning, everybody. I was on with Jim Polito this morning and we talked about the Federal government buying data on US citizens that they got from spyware apps. Programmers, assumptions, and flawed logic of Self-driving cars. Also, Chinese spies, Bytedance, Tencent, and Huawei vs the Trump admin. Here we go with Jim. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com ---  Automated Machine Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah. And that's been a trip that the feds have been using for a very long time. Now are basically almost since it became illegal. They go to data aggregators and they buy whatever they can. Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. And that was me on with Mr. Jim Polito. We got into these hundreds of apps and it looks like there is a spy. Software on them that guess who the number one customer or appears to be? Yes, indeed. The federal guy. So we went into that a little bit. We got into this whole problem now that has been disclosed by AAA with these self-driving driver assist systems that have been steering people at full highway speed into the back of police cars into the back of fire trucks. [00:01:00] Imagine how bad that is. I've been on an accident scene where someone went full force right into the back of a firetruck before. We also got into the latest on this whole China dispute with we chat and Tik Tok. So here we go with Jim, Jim Polito: One of the most popular guests on the show. It is our tech talk guru and good friend, Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir. Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning, Mr. Jim. Jim Polito: Nice to hear your voice. Okay. I want to get into Tik Tok and, uh, some of the other stuff and self-driving cars, but I want to start with this. Hold on, everybody. All of those apps on my smartphone, are you saying that uncle Sam is watching me through those apps? Because I got page after page of them. [00:02:00] Craig Peterson: Well, first of all, the best rule, in general, is to delete apps you're not using right now. Now on your iPhone, it's going to automatically remove the app from your phone if you're not using it and it wants the space. So that's a handy thing, but just rule number one, remove it. Number two. You know this, I think already, Jim. It's illegal for the federal government to track its citizens unless you're part of the Trump campaign, right? Jim Polito: Wait a minute. Yeah. Define illegal because you know, like a Carter page and a lot of other people would, uh, would really like to have a talk with you about that. You're right. Members of the Trump campaign. Uh, not only track but unmasked in large numbers. Craig Peterson: Yeah. It's a scary thing.  If the federal government comes after you and it's like this ton of weight, right. They only have what, a hundred thousand lawyers who know. And it's just little old you, losing your house. [00:03:00] Right. So they're not allowed to track you. So what do you think they do?  I spoke about this on my show. I don't remember as long as ten years ago. I had some of these information brokers on my radio show. And what they do is they take what's known as publicly sourced information, also called open source. So they take stuff that they could find on the internet. They buy things like driver's license records from the state. The many States sell them to make a few extra bucks. I can't remember what the Commonwealth does if they do that or not. Jim Polito: No, they don't. They don't anymore. They don't anymore. When I used to work in business, I used to be able to buy, uh, public records, license information, address, all that. I used to be able to buy it. it stopped you couldn't after a while, they said, okay, we won't sell it anymore. But I used to pay dearly to get that information for marketing. Craig Peterson: Right. It can be really handy. A stage going just North of the new house. I am sure you can off when you go and get registered here car, or driver's license. [00:04:00] You can say, I don't want you to keep my social security number on file or my photograph on file. So the state doesn't keep it, but most States are not that way. So the government can't track you. So what do they do? They go to these data brokers because it's, he goes for them to buy all the information they want from a data broker. And that comes to the point right now that we're talking about, and this is a report from the Wall Street Journal. And according to, uh, according to the Journal here, And the report that they released, at least one federal contractor puts in government tracking software in over 500 mobile applications. [00:05:00] This is a company called Anomaly Six. They are paying application developers, mobile app developers here, to put just this little bit of code into their apps for tracking. So the app developer gets paid a few extra bucks. What the heck Anomaly Six gets all of the information that they possibly can from your phone.  In some cases, everything on the phone, particularly if you've rooted your phone and then guess who buys it from them. Jim Polito: Ah, so, so the government can say we didn't do it. Well, we like this guy over here did, and we just bought it from him, but we didn't do it, Jim. Yeah. We didn't do it to you, but it just so happens. There's this data miner, uh, had code like ours, and what would exactly what we were looking for. And then we bought it from them. Craig Peterson: Yeah. And that's been a trick that the Feds have been using for a very long time. Now are basically almost since that became illegal. They go to data aggregators. And they buy whatever they can. [00:06:00] And so the aggregators they'll get information from the phone company and just everywhere you possibly look. So any fact, the federal government is probably by doing this, getting more information on you than if they were tracking you personally. So it's very concerning. Yeah. Jim Polito: Yeah. Craig Peterson: Yeah. The Wall Street Journal said that they had this information, they have the reports, they know the company, but the company, of course, isn't talking. And the wall street journal tried to figure out which apps it was in. They could not. So although the report is, this is going on and it makes a lot of sense that it would. W they're not like a thousand percent certain based on what I read in their article, but it's something that we've again, we've got to pull in some rains. [00:07:00] Jim Polito: Yeah. But let's do that. Speaking of pulling in range, we're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru all around. Great guy. So tell me about these self-driving cars. Uh, I've got my self-driving car and it will keep me in the lane and I've had the opportunity to drive some of these vehicles with all these latest technologies. Um, but if you come across a parked car, You may have a problem. What's this all about? Craig Peterson: Oh yeah. And the poor occupants of that parked car are going to have even worse problems. There are a number of different systems that are being used for driver-assisted driving or computer-assisted driving right now. So shelf driving not so much exists, but it's still there. They use the same types of technologies. Initially, they were using radar. To try and find stuff in front of them. A lot of them are using LIDAR, which is a very expensive technology, which again, again, is using lasers kind of like radar figure out where everything is, the distance for things moving, et cetera. [00:08:00] Right. Um, and then you've got Tesla who says, I don't want any of that offensive stuff. I'm just gonna use cameras. So driving down the road, this is a test that was conducted by the AAA and driving down the road. They had a car parked in the lane. Now it was just a balloon car basically. Okay. Parked right there in the lane. And every vehicle they tested that had any form of self-driving, rear-ended that just straight, dead on into, without even slowing down. Jim Polito: Why, how so? We couldn't determine. Yeah. Wow. Craig Peterson: Yeah. Here's how I'm. I'm sorry. Uh, you here's how here's why. Okay. These, the software again, have to make assumptions and to have written, I don't know, millions of lines of code over the years. [00:09:00] I couldn't say I've made a lot of assumptions about things, and you're trying to cover all of the possibilities when you're writing this code, but apparently. Everybody seems to make the same mistake, which is if there is something that is fixed, in other words, it's not moving. The question is, is that part of the road? Is that a sign that actually on the side of the road and the software universally appears to be making the decision that well, if it's not moving, it's part of the roadway and I'm probably getting a bit of a false signal here. So let's barrel on and they do. This is a really concerning thing. They have passed this information onto the national transportation safety board, and they've investigated several failed crashes with Tesla, which you have included crashing into parks, police cars, and fire trucks. That seems to be a little bit about what spawned this whole AAA in bed investigation you're crashing head-on, into a parked fire truck. Now, as you know, I was in emergency medicine for 10 years. I was at a scene once and it was icy, icy, icy. [00:10:00] It's the only time I've ever seen. A car went straight on into the back of a firetruck and that actually pushed it forward about 10 feet. Cause the guy was doing 80 miles an hour in a 65 zone. Yeah, this is very, very concerning. Again, everybody, you're supposed to have your hands on the wheel, you're supposed to be paying attention to where you're going because these systems are not mature yet. Jim Polito: Wow. That's something to keep in mind. All right. Quickly before we go. Any new news on Tik Tok and what's the other one We chat. Is that the other Chinese? Uh, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's called a We Chat. Yeah. Yeah. Craig Peterson: So the basic news that many people have probably heard is these two apps or out of China. One of those companies is owned by Tencent, the WeChat app, Tencent, which I talked about a few months ago, my radio show because they have some of the top video games in the world. People absolutely love these Tencent video games out of China again. Why I was talking about it because Tencent is doing something that frankly you should be well, not yet illegal, but no one should ever do. [00:11:00] They take complete control of your windows machine. They are running with Kernel level privileges, it lets them. See, okay everything on your machine, every file on your machine. So you install this Tencent video game and all of a sudden, no, your entire machine has the remote control on it. So President Trump said both the owners of We Chat and. Also Tik Tok, uh, has to be basically be sold to a US company at, within 45 days. But in 45 days, no money can go to either one of those companies from the United States. And personally, I think this is a very, very good move on the part of the Trump administration. [00:12:00] Jim Polito: Excellent. Well, listen. A good move for all of us would be to get more information from Craig Peterson, our tech talker guru. It's a smart move. As Michael Corleone said in godfather one. It's a smart move. Tessio was always smarter. So be Tessio and be smarter. Craig, how can folks get more information from you? Craig Peterson: Well, the best way is to get on my newsletter list. You'll get all my show notes. You'll find out about this free training, the lives that I'm doing. Just go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Jim Polito: Alright, Craig, look forward to catching up with you, um, next week. And until then, sir, be well, stay safe. Craig Peterson: All right, take care. And I'll be back, of course, Saturday at 11:00 AM with a little more in-depth stuff. Excellent. [00:13:00] Jim Polito: Good promo there. Excellent. Excellent promo Craig Peterson, everybody. All right. When we return a final word, you're listening to the Jim Polito show from my kitchen with pops. This is your safe space. Craig Peterson: I really like that guy, man. And it isn't just because he likes me apparently, but I think we've got some good dynamics. I'm going to be so glad when he gets back into the studio. These delays are a little bit annoying. You probably don't hear them if you're listening to the podcast. Cause I edit them out, but there's like a two, three second roundtrip time here from, uh, from him because he's not in the studio is at, at his home. Anyways. We made some good progress yesterday. I, uh, I had my video guy in here and we did some more work. Some more practice, shot some with cameras, I've got new, uh, polarizers here, some circular polarizers for my cameras. See if I can get rid of some of the glare coming from my glasses and stuff and the lights. [00:14:00] And so we're, we're making progress and. I'm really excited about it. So everybody take care and we'll be back tomorrow, as well, by the way. Thanks to Karen. She is getting all, everything caught up after this whole bout that we had. With  just a really kind of crazy two months. Anyhow, take care of everybody and thanks for sticking with me. We'll talk later. Bye. Bye. ---  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome, Good Monday morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Jack Heath this morning discussing How the logic in self-driving cars can kill. General Motors Car Rental plans and Coronavirus and the Death of Uber. Here we go with Jack. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com ---  Automated Machine Generated Transcript: 2020-08-10-wgir-uber_problems-todays_self_driving_cars_can_kill [00:00:00] Craig Peterson: Companies like general motors is betting the bank on not selling cars to individuals, but selling basically renting fleets of cars. Yeah. If you're like me, I'm really disappointed about this new AAA study and our self-driving cars. Of course, this is Craig Peterson and I was on this morning with Mr. Jack Heath. We got into it this morning and a little bit about the problems we're facing and how some of our US automakers might be going down the completely wrong road. Jack Heath: All right. Hey, with a tech talk update, we go to our own Craig Peterson, his show airs on the weekend's Tech Talk, Craig joins live on the AutoFair listener lines. Good morning, Craig. [00:01:00] Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning, Jack. What do you have? Did you hear the latest? About the parked cars and some of these automatic driving cars. There have been some tests that have been conducted here lately, showing that in recent years, some of these car companies like Tesla, for instance, have these driver assistance systems.  The whole idea behind them is to stay in the lane and they have these adaptive cruise controls. More and more companies are starting to come out with them. Well, there's an interesting study that is just happened here. A report from AAA has found that they do not stop or divert themselves for cars parked, even in the lane, in front of them. In other words, if there's a car broken down in front of you on the highway, these self-driving systems, none of them were tested, will avoid the car. They just ran right into it. And it has to do with the logic in the system saying, well, if it's a fixed object, if it's not moving, it's probably off the side of the road, so I don't need to worry about it. So there go my hopes for having a self-driving car in a couple of years. [00:02:00] Jack Heath: Yeah. It might take a while. Justin McIssac: It sounds like self-driving cars were designed in Massachusetts. Jack Heath: Hey, we haven't talked about this in a while, but you know, before the quote-unquote COVID-19 thing, Uber was just coming into more places, more available and places like New Hampshire. How has the whole pandemic and the whole Uber thing? I mean, they, they weren't even profitable, to begin with, but I mean, Where's Uber at? I'm just curious. Craig Peterson: Yeah. Uber is an interesting problem. They just lost. What was it? Like two, almost 2 billion. It might've been just over $1 billion, right? Jack Heath: Just a couple of zeros. It’s a rounding error. [00:03:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah, exactly. Compared to the US budget. So now they're in really bad shape. I just got from Uber this last week, three rides at 50% off offer. Now I haven't used Uber in probably a year, but they are getting very desperate.  Many of these companies like General Motors, is betting the bank on not selling cars to individuals, but basically renting fleets of cars. So GM would have a car show up when you want it to show up. All automatically. I think all of these guys are going to be completely, really rethinking what they've been doing because frankly, a safe self-driving car, it’s just not here. It's not in the near future. So, this is really going to upset all of the manufacturers in cars worldwide. Jack Heath: Yeah. And, uh, you know, it's, it's just one of these trends, people are not out and about not doing as much business travel and it's just interesting that it's going to all shake out. All right. Thank you, Craig Peterson. I appreciate it. You have a good one tech talk. Craig Peterson: Thank you, sir. Hey, take care. I'll be back Saturday at 1130. Jack Heath: Alright, thanks, Craig. Craig Peterson: Hey everybody. [00:04:00] Thanks for so many kind comments here. I got dozens and dozens of them. We've been through a lot. And if you've been listening, you know, I kind of dropped the hint about my having had this whole WuHan virus and the COVID-19 symptoms and how that has knocked me on my but here. I still have that muscle soreness. I feel like I just finished a big workout, which is kind of crazy. But anyway, that's the only thing left. Apparently, that residual of, I felt like I just worked out like crazy, last weeks or sometimes even months. They're saying. So, I have that to look forward to, I guess as well. But we did get a newsletter out and there's a little note in there from me and Karen helped a little bit with some of that, too. Of course, she put together all of the stuff on the articles that I had selected for this week. So, thanks to her as well for all of her help. I will be back tomorrow, of course, on with Jim Polito on two powerhouse stations down in Mass that actually cover parts of Vermont and Rhode Island and Connecticut as well. [00:05:00] I'm still doing all of this stuff. We're still reworking things in the studio. I'm meeting with my video guy this afternoon. Again, we've been getting together multiple times a week sometimes just trying to get together so we can do a lot more training for you guys. So have a great day and. Thanks again, guys, for all of those kind words and well wishes and prayers. I really do appreciate it. Back tomorrow and visit online of course, as well. Craig Peterson out. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Craig discusses the Cost of Data Breaches and the IBM/Ponemon Institute Study.  For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: Average Cost of a Data Breach: $3.86 Million The Future's Biggest Cybercrime Threat May Already Be Here Election Interference: Google Purges Breitbart from Search Results Google Has Been Purging Breitbart Content from Search Results Since the 2016 Election Heads roll at Intel after 7nm delay Out-of-Date and Unsupported Cloud Workloads Continue as a Common Weakness Three people have been charged for Twitter’s huge hack, and a Florida teen is in jail Remote Work Isn’t Working? Maybe Your Company Is Doing It Wrong FBI Releases Flash Alert on Netwalker Ransomware Electric car startup Lucid is challenging Tesla’s anti-lidar stance --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] We got a lot to cover as per usual. We're going to talk about data breaches today. We're gonna talk about cybercrime today. Election interference. What's going on with the big social media sites. This is Craig Peterson. I'm so glad you guys have decided to join me today. I am doing a little bit more with video today. So if you are online, you might be able to find me. I am not putting this video up until later on, you get to hear me first here on all of our radio stations and affiliates throughout the Northeast, which is really kind of cool. Now we keep expanding. Yes. And we're doing more in the Facebook realm and the YouTube realm.  I got to start out with a little bit of an apology here. we were going back and looking at all of our numbers. We're trying to figure out what's going on because I was getting dozens and dozens and dozens of emails from listeners saying, why did you send me this email? [00:01:00] Cause I've been opening all your emails. And they were really confused. Well, here's, here's what goes on. Okay. If you don't open my emails for a few weeks, then I'm kind of figuring that maybe you're really busy. Something's going on. Maybe you don't like the sorts of things that I've been saying or doing. Maybe you want off the list and stuff. And so I sent out all of those emails to people. Well, it turns out we hadn't sent out an email since June 13th. And you might remember that's when one of my daughters got married and we went out to Kentucky then everything happened with the family is just been crazy. Then I've been trying to get all of this video stuff together and that's been a lot of work. Two. So my apologies to you, if I sent you that email, and you're wondering why, why is he doing this to me? Cause he knows, I like him. So I think I was able to restore everybody back to proper balance here as synergy. [00:02:00] We'll see how this all goes. And then the other thing that was messing up, this is what I get for not paying enough attention to some of these things is. All of our podcasts are definitely going out. We've been posting those and they're going out by the podcast mechanism. We've even still been including a transcript of the entire podcast. Craig Peterson: So you can go back and search and everything. Well, they had not been. Going up onto my website since also about June 13th. So I don't know that we're going to catch up on those on the website. You can definitely get them by you're going to my podcast feed, which you'll find online as well. Craig peterson.com. Slash podcast. And yeah, if you're an iTunes user, go to Craig peterson.com/itunes, uh, slash you know, wherever you'll find me on all your favorite podcast mediums. So it's there, it's not on my way website and the [00:03:00] emails didn't go out. Yes. It has been one of those summers. And then, yeah, what happened this week? We had our tornado. Two towns over from me from this, uh, latest storm. I F it's, it's a different name on, I can't remember what it is. Uh, it's like I say, uh, there are other, and, uh, we, so I ran outside. I was in a meeting. I said, Hey, listen, guys, I got to go. And I grabbed some straps and I wrapped them around the beehives and around the pallets the beehives are sitting on because I do keep rocks on top. Take help them from blowing over in the light wind, but we get wind. We lost power. I had to bring all of the equipment back up in my studio, all of the computers and stuff. It, it just, wasn't a pleasant experience. Anyhow. That was my week, Hell. How was yours? [00:04:00] Hey, I want to start by talking again about this new report that was put together by the Ponemon Institute. Now you may be familiar with these guys. You may not be familiar with these skies, but it was put together for IBM and IBM has published it. So I'm going to bring it up on the screen. For those of you who are watching this as a video. Uh, this is the cost of a data breach report for 2020. And this I'm showing here for those people who are watching for those that aren't. If you want to look it up, just go and do a search for the Cost of a Data Breach Report 2020 IBM and you'll find it. So they did a study on over 500 data breaches. Very, very big. And, and this study was done by the  Institute and then it was analyzed and published by IBM securities that say right there, the data breach costs are absolutely huge when you get right down to it, right. [00:05:00] What kind of business are you with? You know, are you doing just a little guy and the data breach costs, won't be a lot while it could easily put you out of business. Most small businesses, really small businesses just fold within six months. It's bad. So this is showing us here. Yeah. That the global average total cost of a database is 3.86. Million dollars. Now that's down a little bit from last year, one and a half percent. And what is really saving people, what's really saving businesses is automation. See one of the biggest mistakes businesses make when it comes to the computer security network security VPN security is they've got a veritable plethora. [00:06:00] Of different pieces of equipment and software. So you've got what are called panes of glass. So you've got you whole five, 10 different systems that your analysts have to look at to figure out what's going on. Are the computers up to date? Did someone try to break in, is someone trying to break in right now? Did they get in what data did they have access to any data exfiltrated did we catch it right? All of those types of questions. So. Automation, where you have one pane of glass, allows you to have all of these what's from your advanced malware prevention, the intrusion detection, intrusion prevention systems, the endpoint. [00:07:00] Anti-malware that's sending on your computers, the, uh, the DNS that allows you to monitor where people are going and stop places as well as stop ransomware from getting out. Think about all of these different points inside your network. And then if you're a slightly bigger company, you know, small businesses, according to the small business administration go up to 500 employees, that is a lot of data to analyze. Yeah. A lot of data to look at false reports, false negatives, real positives that you have to drill into. Well, you don't want to have to go to half a dozen. Different pieces of glass to figure out what happened. You don't want to have to go and look at the antivirus software, which failed too, by the way, because it always does. Uh, and then look, and hopefully you can look at the firewall logs. Hopefully, you've got it. Detection, intrusion prevention. Oh, hopefully, you've got it all tied in. So it automatically, that's our fun machine. That's been compromised from the network. You know how many people have that. But what is being sent here in this IBM study is that there was a reduction in dramatic reduction when security automation was put in place. [00:08:00] So that's what I'm talking about here, where it notices something that detects something and shuts it down. So we've got a client that has a location down in Mexico and they have their networks, or I should say, had their networks tied together. Now they didn't want to separate the networks because they had people in Mexico that were VPN in and then they could get on a server locally up here in the Northeast and then do all of the work from there. And that way they don't have to keep these local servers up to date. Hopefully. Which they weren't, but, um, try and keep them up to date and control them through one exchange server. So all of the accounts and stuff would just be in one place. And, uh, what happened is one of these workstations in Mexico got infected and it hopped right, right through the network. [00:09:00] Up to here in the Northeast here in the US that happens all the time. I've done pieces of training on VPNs and the right way to configure them and the right way to use them. Obviously, this was all wrong, but we had very advanced firepower. The firewall in there that was doing intrusion detection and prevention, and it noticed data starting to be taken out exfiltrated is what it's called via this link to Mexico. And after a few megabytes, Of data going out. It might've been a gigabyte or so, uh, saying, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. This isn't normal. And this isn't something that should be going on through to Mexico. Now they are in a different time zone. So the firewall was automatically taking that into account and figuring out how to tie it all together. [00:10:00] Uh, so it shut it down, just bam and it no longer love that machine. Any access to the network up here in the U S. Now since then we have tightened things up even more. They said, Oh, okay. Well, we'll do what you told us to do 18 months ago. And it is now really quite secure, but that is because we had a fully integrated system. That's why we use Cisco. Cisco was the only a company right now that has a soup to nuts platform and system that you can use that meat. All federal regulatory requirements. The only one, no, you look at Symantec, they got some really fun stuff. They've got some nice stuff. Doesn't meet the federal requirement. You can look at SonicWall and they, man, it's like outcomes raiser, right? They, they really walk that fine tight line in what they say and what they provide. But. Having this type of automation in place, according to IBM study here now reduced the average total cost 3.5, $8 million from somebody trying to get in or getting in. [00:11:00] Now we like to make sure they never get it in the first place, but typically all of these automated systems that we're using and that you could be used as well. We'll detect it almost immediately and we'll shut it down. So stick around. We've got more to talk about here. When it comes to this report, there are so many great stats about what's been happening. So stick around. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and visit me online. Make sure you sign up. Craig peterson.com/subscribe and I promise, promise, promise.  Just started sending out that newsletter again. We'll be right back. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Craig discusses the Cost of Data Breaches and IBM/Ponemon Institute Study and why Credential theft is a pre-eminent form of Cybercrime. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: Average Cost of a Data Breach: $3.86 Million The Future's Biggest Cybercrime Threat May Already Be Here Election Interference: Google Purges Breitbart from Search Results Google Has Been Purging Breitbart Content from Search Results Since the 2016 Election Heads roll at Intel after 7nm delay Out-of-Date and Unsupported Cloud Workloads Continue as a Common Weakness Three people have been charged for Twitter’s huge hack, and a Florida teen is in jail Remote Work Isn’t Working? Maybe Your Company Is Doing It Wrong FBI Releases Flash Alert on Netwalker Ransomware Electric car startup Lucid is challenging Tesla’s anti-lidar stance --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Welcome back, everybody we're talking right now about IBM's latest data breach report. What does it mean to businesses and you as a home user? Of course, this is Craig Peterson that you're listening to. You can get my weekly report by just going online. I have a newsletter. We have a whole ton of great information available for you. So check that out, make sure you subscribe and I've got well, it's like four different free gifts. One of them is the most coveted gift that I've given out. I've had so many great compliments on it and that's your security reboot guide, but you'll get that. If you sign up Craig Peterson.com/subscribe, I think you're really, really going to like it. So we were talking about the IBM report before the break. [00:01:00] Let's complete that. Now, this is the cost of a data breach report, 2020, and it was done by the Ponemon Institute. And then IBM did some analysis on it. So let's look at the average total cost by security automation level. Fully deployed 2.4, $5 million. So if you fully deploy your security, if you have everything, your security team tells you. Yeah, you need a breach is going to cost you about two and a half million dollars. If you've partially deployed like My customer here who had the breach coming in via Mexico. And so we had some stuff there, but not everything that we had recommended. And there is actually required by the federal regulations he's supposed to be abiding by partially deployed the cost jumps from 2.4, 5 million [00:02:00] to 4.1, $1 million, the cost of a breach. So let me see right there. You save yourself almost $2 million, which is more than what it would cost you to do this, right? If you're a small business and then not deployed at all, a breach is going to cost you about $6.03 million. Absolutely incredible. Now, where are the main parts of this cost while the customers personally identifiable information. So that's things like there, their name, their email address, their phone number, a bank account numbers, maybe social security numbers maybe credit cards. Right? All of that is called PII and it's the stuff that should not ever be disclosed. So if you're a consumer, you kind of expect the business to keep that information confidential, right? Well, Oh, [00:03:00] here we go. Breaches that have customer identifiable information account for 80% of all of the breaches. Isn't that sad? So 80% of the time when there's a breach, somebody's personal information is stolen. And the average cost per record customer record in a malicious attack is about $175 in case you're not aware of it. If you're a retailer. A retailer is to find incredible amounts. I think right now it's a minimum of $125 per credit card that they've taken. If it's breached and they have credit card information on their systems. That's a lot of money, but on average it costs about $175 per customer record. That's stolen next up here on the screen green, and you'll find this online [00:04:00] again by searching for IBM and their 2020 data breach report, compromised credentials, and cloud misconfiguration. Lead the way, well, compromised credentials. Hmm. What would those be? But how about you or username and password more and more businesses are moving to the cloud. And if you are using the same email address and you're using the same password yet, you knew what I was going to say. Didn't you for your accounts? You're in trouble. And that's why I keep reminding people that they should go to have I been poned.com to check and see if their email address has been stolen and a breach I'm playing around, by the way, I almost guarantee it has unless you've got a very, very current email [00:05:00] address. So 19% had these breaches came in through compromised credentials, other ways to do that. Obviously nowadays fishing is a very, very big way that does some of this data is stolen, but these were the most expensive initial tech vectors, compromised credentials, and cloud misconfiguration. Now, you know how much I hate VPNs right now, there is a need for them. Don't get me wrong. But. Almost always, it's more of a problem than the problem you're trying to solve using a VPN. So one of the things we were talked about here just a couple of weeks ago was how the VPN data from, I think it was eight different VPN providers. Was found online, like 1.2 terabytes [00:06:00] worth of personal information. Now, these are all VPN services that said we don't log we're not logging. Don't worry. We're great. Here. You can trust us. We're secure and we're not logging. We're not selling your data. What was discovered online in a misconfigured cloud server? All of the places you had been your password in the clear text your username. So they, they now, now that data are stolen anybody that was using one of them is free VPN services. And I caution you against the paid ones as well, but anyone that was using one of these free VPN services is out of luck because the bad guys have your username that you use and your password. So again, that's why I keep stressing, get one password. It's the best bar, none one password. I don't make a dime off of this. Right. Uh, but one password [00:07:00] and make sure you use different passwords every time and have one password generate them for you. I have one password generate passwords that are usually four or five words along. And then I have special characters between each one of the words, and those are almost impossible to crack. It would take over a hundred years in most cases unless I'm using one of these VPN services that doesn't bother encrypting my password. My day, wasn't doing some sort of a Shaw hash or an MD hash or anything? No, no, no, no clear text. Okay. Uh, so 19% were from compromised credentials. 19% were from cloud misconfiguration and 16%. We're from vulnerability in third-party software. So the costliest initial attack, vectors compromised credentials, number one. So keep that in mind, everybody on you, with your home [00:08:00] user, you're a business user on that rudder heaven forbid you're using a consumer router and firewall in a business. Don't do it. And in most cases, people never bothered to change the default username and password on their firewall. So bad guys get in 4.7, 7 million in dollars is the average cost with compromised credentials, amazing vulnerability and third party software, four and a half million dollars. And what does that tell you? Patch. Remember when you're talking about Microsoft and you've turned on the automatic updates on windows, all it's going to update is windows and the core windows utilities. It's not going to update your Adobe software, uh, you know, your photoshop and whatever third party. You know, engineering [00:09:00] software, drafting, software, whatever. It's not going to automatically update them. And then it's so many businesses are saying, well, okay, you have to run Windows XP or have to run windows seven because I can't and get the latest version of the software. The company went out of business or it's too expensive. And then number three, cloud misconfiguration. So both vulnerability and third-party software. And club misconfiguration accounts for about a four and a half million dollar breach each real big deal. So stick around, we're going to go through some more here. I enjoy being with you. Thanks for being with me. We will be right back. You're listening to Craig Peterson. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Craig discusses How to check and see if you have been a victim of Cybercrime. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: Average Cost of a Data Breach: $3.86 Million The Future's Biggest Cybercrime Threat May Already Be Here Election Interference: Google Purges Breitbart from Search Results Google Has Been Purging Breitbart Content from Search Results Since the 2016 Election Heads roll at Intel after 7nm delay Out-of-Date and Unsupported Cloud Workloads Continue as a Common Weakness Three people have been charged for Twitter’s huge hack, and a Florida teen is in jail Remote Work Isn’t Working? Maybe Your Company Is Doing It Wrong FBI Releases Flash Alert on Netwalker Ransomware Electric car startup Lucid is challenging Tesla’s anti-lidar stance --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] We've been going through the IBM data breach and we're bound to talk about nation States. What are they doing to us? Stick around. Here we go. Hey, Craig Peterson here. I want to thank you guys for joining me. If you are interested in this sort of thing in security in general, whether you're a home user. You're a small business owner. Maybe you're the person responsible for cybersecurity in the organization. Right? Who am I? I'm the operations manager, I am the general business manager and you got stuck with security as part of your job description. Hey, this is the place to be and make sure you are on. My email list, Craigpeterson.com/subscribe, because I want to keep everybody up to date on that. I also enjoy talking about [00:01:00] some of the cool stuff that's out there and the consumer. So, you know, it's there for kind of everybody that likes the technology. I am somebody that tends to go kind of deep. I don't go so deep here I go a lot deeper in my courses, but I go deeper than anybody else on the radio. I get comments every week from people just so thankful that I do that, right? It's a bit of a risk. You gotta be really good at explaining things. If you are going to be able to go deep at all, especially on some of these technical topics. So let's get back to our friends here over at IBM and the latest report that they have released. And let's talk about nation-state attacks. These are a little less common than they used to be. But they come and they go, and I think they're less common because the COVID-19 frankly, but they are also the costliest. IBM saying that [00:02:00] nation-state actors caused 13% of malicious breaches while 50. 3% were caused by financially motivated attackers, but again, nation-States were the costliest. So here's what we're looking at here. This is the average total cost in US dollars. And over on the side of you watching this on the video side, you'll see the share malicious breaches per thread, actor type. So nation-States four and a half million dollars average cost. Unknown where it came from. Right. And the nation-States are pretty good about hiding who they are. A 4.2, $9 million hacktivists 4.28 million. And these are the people who are trying to push their agenda. Right. They have a religion about, uh, you name it global warming or socialism, communism, fascism. Right? [00:03:00] Those are the hacktivist people and financially motivated. Right? 4.2, 3 million. Now you notice that although the nation-state actors are the most costly, it's not by much. Okay. So what do we learn from this? Any sort of compromise where they have broken into your systems and stolen data is going to cost you no matter who does it now, the effectiveness of incident response grew over the last year and that's really good. Really good thing. You should have an incident response team. And I have, if you're interested, I have a handout that we put together. It's I can't remember. It's like eight or 10 pages, just kind of high level, who should be on that incident response team. And I'd be glad to send that to you can just email me M e@craigpeterson.com, but it explains incident response in [00:04:00] case this again is kind of new to you. What the titles of the people who are part of this should be how you should integrate legal human resources. The business owner or CEO. Okay. So I'd be glad to send that to you. M e@craigpeterson.com, but, uh, you know, organizations that had an incident response team and tested it, average breach costs of 3.29 million. And. If you didn't have an incident response team or you weren't drilling your incident response within the organization, it costs you $2 million more, 5.29 million for business organizations with neither incident response teams nor testing. That's pretty darn big. A mega-breach. Oh, I should point out too, by the way, the car savings for having an incident response team and I are testing $2 million. Right. And that's, [00:05:00] that's the number I just gave you, but I wanted to drive that point. Home is not going to cost you $2 million. I have a good incident response team and to practice incident response drills with everybody in the organization, mega breaches. Now, these are where you have more than one. Million records that are stolen. That's called a mega breach. It doesn't happen very often, but it happens every year, multiple times. So the average cost for a mega breach of 50 million records, which is nothing. Look at Equifax, right? It was over 200 million people's personally identifiable information. So the average cost of a mega-breach is. Through almost $400 million. So we'll leave it there. Um, This goes into how many records. So if you just have one to 10 million records that are breached well, that's a $50 million cost to you. Uh, and it goes up from [00:06:00] there. Okay. So you can find all of this. I've got it up on the screen at the ibm.com/data breach. I hope you do check it out. Cause this is important information for everybody. Okay. So data breaches are a very, very big deal. And we have to understand them. We have to work with them. And as consumers let's put on a different hat, you really need to be looking and something else. So let me show you something here. Uh, okay. So I'm going to pull this up. I'm going to put it on the camera so that those people. Who is watching this on video can see it, but this is a site called have I been pawned? So let me pull up puppy here and you can put in your own email address. Now. Some people. Pay for services that are like this. And you know, if you want to pay for [00:07:00] them, I guess. Yeah. Go ahead and makes you feel better. Uh, this is absolutely free. In fact, you can sign up and get alerts when things happen. I remember I told you 12th, these mega breaches look at these largest breaches. This particular one had 772 million records. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to enter my Craig. At Craig peterson.com email address. Okay. And a, you could certainly send me an email there if you do. I may or may not see it, right. You're better off using me at Craig Peterson, but this is my old address that had been up there for a long time. So have I been pawned is all spelled out, but I shouldn't say pwned, it's spelled Let H A V E I B E EN like, have I been, and then pwned misspelled, P w N E D P w N E D. So, check it out right now! How have I been [00:08:00] poned.com? So I'm going to check and see, has my email address shown up? So it's saying, Oh no, pwned okay. So it says there were four breached sites and no pastes. Now the pace is a completely different thing, but it's just a different way, of the bad guys sharing your information online. So it's telling you who I'll look at this one. The password is what you should use. You should have two-factor authentication, which I talk about all the time as well, and subscribe to notifications. Cause he will. Provide with notifications. I suspect his start using one password.com button is probably, he makes a couple of bucks off of it. So why not? Right. Because poor guy doing all of this, he's trying to sell the company, but he says you're if you buy it, the, have I been pwned you have to continue to make free. So it's saying that Apollo in July 2018, the sales engagement [00:09:00] startup Apollo luck database containing billions of data points publicly exposed without a password. There's a subset of the data that had 126 million unique email addresses. And it tells you also what data was compromised. So email addresses, employers, geographical locations, job titles, all kinds of stuff. B2B USA, business data, enrichment exposure from PDL and verifications dot I O. All right. So that's it for now, but we're going to be, be right back. And we're going to be talking about our next topic for the day, which is going to be. The future and cybercrime. Did you know that the biggest threat may already be here? Listening to Craig Peterson, stick around. We'll be right back. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Craig discusses the Future of Cybercrime and Why it might already be here.  For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: Average Cost of a Data Breach: $3.86 Million The Future's Biggest Cybercrime Threat May Already Be Here Election Interference: Google Purges Breitbart from Search Results Google Has Been Purging Breitbart Content from Search Results Since the 2016 Election Heads roll at Intel after 7nm delay Out-of-Date and Unsupported Cloud Workloads Continue as a Common Weakness Three people have been charged for Twitter’s huge hack, and a Florida teen is in jail Remote Work Isn’t Working? Maybe Your Company Is Doing It Wrong FBI Releases Flash Alert on Netwalker Ransomware Electric car startup Lucid is challenging Tesla’s anti-lidar stance --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] I can't believe it's been an hour. Hey, we're going to talk right now about the futures, biggest cybercrime threat. And guess what? It's already here. Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson. I really appreciate you being with me and I enjoy being here on the radio. You can also hear me during the week, so make sure you listen to morning drive time. Those appearances as well. Well, we're going to get into really the future here. What is the future? What does it contain? It's a crystal ball, right? Well, in reality, there is no crystal ball, but this is a great article that I want to review with you guys. It's from a site. Called dark reading. And if you are someone who is involved in cybersecurity, it really is a must-follow site. There's just so much great stuff in here, [ 00:01:00] but this is about the future of cybercrime. And what does that mean? So let's, uh, I'm going to kind of zoom in a little bit here on this, so you can see it on the screen. If you're watching this in the video, um, Bottom line, the bad guys are paying a lot of attention to what we're doing. They're paying attention to what the FBI is doing, what cybersecurity professionals are doing. What's being done also by the businesses out there. The responses. To these crimes. And sometimes they'll even get really advanced and start poking. And see if you notice we had a law firm, a big law firm, one of the biggest in the state and they reached out and we went in and talked to them and said that, well, they said, Oh, we're all set. We're all set. Right. Which is what we hear every time. And yet we've never walked into a business that was really all set. Right. [00:02:00] So we were working with our, it people, their security people. And we said, Hey, is it okay here? Let's just do a test. If can I try and drive a freight train through your front door and, uh, do a little bit of a white hat backing here. And they said, yeah, absolutely. Let's have a look. Let's see if, if our security provider even notices. We drove, not afraid train, but I am a multitude of freight trains, including cross Continentals. Through the front door. Uh, and guess what nobody noticed it, nobody noticed at all, because we went back and talked to them and, uh, Dick, who was the guy we were dealing with there, who was our it, the head of it said, yeah, you know, we didn't get any calls. I said, okay. So that's great. Let's get down to work here. We'd be more than glad to clean things up for you and have a look at what you got and maybe help backfill a little bit. And. [00:03:00] No, no, there's no budget for it. You're only a loft, right? With w with incredible amounts of PII. Plus all of the case histories, we, we had another small, this was a one-man practice where someone had. Paid to hack into his computers. Uh, apparently his ex-wife and she charged it on his credit card. So that's part of what we're going to talk about here right now. We've, we've all known about the fake news and the propaganda that's going on and sometimes see something new, but you know what it is, it's not that much different from what had happened with the Nigerian scam, right. Although. They were just broadcasting to everybody trying to get somebody to bite today. It's the same thing but refined it's refined down to what we call phishing or spear-phishing attacks. So as they're saying right here, they are growing [00:04:00] in sophistication. They're looking to focus on what works best and when it does work best. Now, this is the part that I think is very, very, very. Concerning to me, and it should be for everybody else. And that is that you can get hackers for hire. How long ago was that law? That small law firm, about two years ago. Um, and back then, I think it was 50 bucks and fed, uh, that was paid on this lawyer's credit card by his ex-wife that apparently was for hacker services. Well, now they're way more complicated and professional. So. The hackers start now at $300 to hack an individual for $300. You can have a person hacked and get at their data. And in the case, so the small law firm is a one-man operation. They ended up deleting. [00:05:00] All of his court documents that had to be filed, all got deleted. Any pictures of his kid got deleted or, or his ex-wife got deleted. That one. It's what they do. And union 300 bucks. Yeah. Yeah. Deal. Right. So when a young adult over in Eurasia can get $7,000 per month. $7,000 is enough to support a family in many of those countries for a year, a year. Okay. That's how much money they can make so they can get $7,000 a month. By conducting cyber extortions sound like a big deal to you. What's cyber extortion while it can be a number of things nowadays, again, they just refine the techniques. Ransomware has been around a long time, but it's still refined now. So extortion could be something as simple as old fashioned ransomware, where they encrypt all of [00:06:00] your data and then they demand money from you. To get your data back. And according to the FBI, the odds are about 50% that you'll get all your data back if you pay the ransom. Okay. So the odds aren't that great if you do pay so on the other side, Uh, if you don't pay, what do you have to do? Well, you have to restore from backups. Did your backups work? Will your backups take months to download? Because it's up in the cloud somewhere. Most backups take at least a week to download. And does your backup provider have the option to put all your files on a hard disk and ship it to you? So that you can now restore those files. Right. Uh, and so the other way they're doing extortion is failing, pop up. This is so clear are so refined, right? They'll get on your machine and they'll take control. No, no, no, it's not. It doesn't mean that they're controlling and your [00:07:00] mouse and your senior mouse move when you're not expecting it and things type being program's coming up on your screen. No, they do it in the background. So they will install are basically a remote control. And then within a couple of weeks, weeks, one, or their people will hop onto your machine and see what files you have there. Now, if there are great financial files or maybe there are designs of intellectual property, maybe there's personally identifiable information of your customers. They'll say, Oh, okay, well, this is actually pretty good. And they will upload all of those files. He'll grab them off the machine. Now there's still a copy on your machine. Your machine's still working really well. There's no problem here. And then they will pop up a message for you. Kind of like a ransomware message. It says if you don't pay up. We're going to release all of this data and they'll give you some samples of some of your data, right? And [00:08:00] so people start freaking out. Well, there you go. That's another example of cyber extortion that's happening right now. So these guys and gals over there they're in Eurasia can make almost a million dollars a year. It's readily achievable. According to this article here, and I believe it over on dark reading.com. So it's a very, very lucrative proposition because if you make a million dollars in those countries, you, your family, your extended family is set for maybe the rest of their lives, certainly for a decade. And you're just a rich American who cares, right. If we steal that money from you. Now it goes on to talk about the weakest link here. Okay. And they talk about the human firewall. I refer to where right? You've got hardware. Do you know what that is? You got the software, you know what that is? You've [00:09:00] got firmware. Which is software that's embedded in the hardware? And then you've got wetware, which is us, right. Mostly water, as said, in, in that star Trek episode, right. Bags of water, I think is how that alien referred to us. So we're wetware and we are. The biggest problem. In many, many cases, remember we went through the statistics from IBM on attack vectors and compromised passwords and usernames compromised accounts were the number one way to get in. And also the most costly when it came to a breach. So these phishing attempts, which again, think of the old Nigerian scams, how they've morphed today into a, it's a note from Bank of America telling you that your account has been frozen. You need to click through and do an update or. Very recent here. I've been getting these for the last few weeks. It's a note from [00:10:00] Amazon saying that your prime membership has been suspended because your credit card didn't work when it was charged. And if you want your prime membership to continue, you have to go onto their website. No, no, no, you don't type it in, just click this link, right? Those efficient attempts. Now the shocking part of this is 70 to 90. Percent of these successful breaches come from. Social engineering, phishing attacks, one type of social engineering. There's a number of others. What just happened to Twitter, where Barack Obama was telling you to send him a Bitcoin. So send me a thousand dollars in Bitcoin. I'll send you back 2000 as part of payback for you, right? Because you deserve that money. And it was, I think over 120,000 toddlers people sent this hacker. Well, how did they get in. How'd they get into Twitter to take over all of these big accounts, big named accounts? [00:11:00] Well, they use social engineering. They called on the phone and they got people inside Twitter to believe they were from it. Very very big deal. So the criminals have a lot of ways to do stuff. They've got a lot of tools. We're starting to see artificial intelligence. We had another one called vishing and this was an interesting one that happened over in the UK. They were owned by a German company and they got a phone call from the owner. There's a German company. Right? I think it was supposedly the CEO and he told them to wire some money over. And this is the amount. These are the account numbers. The voice was entirely generated. It was not a real human being. Okay. So we gotta be careful here. There are so many examples of it happening, but we'll see what happens with five G coming down the pike here. We're really starting to look at the internet [00:12:00] of forgotten things. How many pieces of the internet of things hardware do you have? That you've forgotten about how many of them have patches available? How many of them ever had a single patch available? Have you been patching your light bulbs, people? Cause that's what it comes down to. Alright. Stick around. We're losing some stations. Now either's going to stick with us, make sure you visit me online. So you get all of this stuff. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. I love to hear from you and try and keep you a little bit up to date on the goings-on. Take care of everybody. If you're leaving, have a great week. Hey, you're gonna have a great week, even if you're not leaving and we will be back after the top of the hour. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Craig discusses What Google is up to and how they are trying to steer the Election.  For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: Average Cost of a Data Breach: $3.86 Million The Future's Biggest Cybercrime Threat May Already Be Here Election Interference: Google Purges Breitbart from Search Results Google Has Been Purging Breitbart Content from Search Results Since the 2016 Election Heads roll at Intel after 7nm delay Out-of-Date and Unsupported Cloud Workloads Continue as a Common Weakness Three people have been charged for Twitter’s huge hack, and a Florida teen is in jail Remote Work Isn’t Working? Maybe Your Company Is Doing It Wrong FBI Releases Flash Alert on Netwalker Ransomware Electric car startup Lucid is challenging Tesla’s anti-lidar stance --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Hey right now, we're going to talk about election interference. What's really going on with Google, not Russia. They're the ones that are interfering and we got evidence Hey everybody, Craig Peterson here on WGAN. Thanks for joining me today. I really appreciate it. I appreciate your time and all of the emails that I've received. Yeah. If you heard the first hour, you know, I have received a lot of them and many of them were questioning. Why did you send me this email about not opening your emails? Cause I love your emails. Don't drop me, please. Um, yeah. Well, it turns out, due to circumstances beyond my control. We've just been so busy. We had the wedding, we had to go to Kentucky and then there's the whole COVID thing, other family issues, and just stuff going on. Including the all-new video [00:01:00] stuff that I've been working on that we're going to be doing some pieces of training and everything. It's just been crazy. So I apologize. I apologize, apologize. I think we're going to be able to get this all into control. So if you've got one of those emails from me, you can ignore them. If you did click on the link for the surprise bonuses for reactivating your account. You got some very cool stuff. And I want to mention too, if you're not on my email list where you get my newsletter and you will get indications about the upcoming pieces of training and stuff if you want to get on that, I have even more surprises for you. One of them, I guess it wouldn't be a surprise if I told you, I'm going to tell you, because I'm excited about this, right? One of them is the security, reboot guide, something everybody needs. It's great for home users. It is great for, or businesses as well, small and large. I focus on small and medium businesses. That is out there and you can get that [00:02:00] easily by going to Craig peterson.com/subscribe, Craig peterson.com/subscribe. And you will get my, hopefully, back to normal, weekly newsletter, plus a bunch of bonuses. So keep an eye on email box for a couple of weeks afterward, cause I'll be dropping some things off to you. Appreciate you guys. That's how I'm letting you know we put a lot of work into the show and a lot of work into everything we do, because we care. Right. Well, that's what it's all about here. I do need to obviously make money to keep the lights on. But most people don't need the types of security services that I offer. So I'm offering all of these free services that I possibly can to help people out. The services that I offer, a lot of businesses need them that are in government contracting. So the new CMMC regulations. [00:03:00] Those are the guys that I help and I help them every day and help them get along and move forward. By the way, the federal government now has decided, I think this is kind of a great idea that since they are requiring our small businesses to comply with the CMMC regulations, which have, by the way, criminal penalties, including 10 years of jail time and millions of dollars in fines. Well, they're putting that sword of Damocles over your head. They're also saying, "Hey, we'll pay for it. Just pass on your cost upstream." Keep that in mind if you're interested in that. If you're not sure send me a note. M E@craigpeterson.com me@craigpeterson.com. And I can send you a couple of records. You can probably find it if you Google it as well, but I think that's a great idea. They are putting costs. No, it, it [00:04:00] depends, but basically it can be a hundred thousand dollars a year, fairly easily on these small businesses. And the federal government said, Hey, you can pass these along and we'll pay him so good news there. So let's get into our next topic here. And this is fascinating. You know, we heard for years that Russia was interfering with our election years. And it always really bothered me because there was no evidence of it. And now we found out that those same people that we're walking out of congressional testimony meetings, you know, the secret hearings that were held by representative Schiff down in the basement, in a skiff and in a secure room that no one could, could listen in on. Well, now those transcripts have come out. And it turns out every last one of those people who were on [00:05:00] TV, the saying, uh, yeah, president of drama, he's colluding with the Russians. We have absolute proof of it. Including chairman Schiff himself. We have absolute proof of it and people are going to go to jail and everything else. In the, in the closed-door hearings, when they were sworn in and giving testimony, all of them denied that there was any evidence that the administration was colluding with Russia. So, what has Russia been doing? Well, they, I definitely have been trying to interfere in the elections, but they've been really mess something awful. One of their biggest ads on Facebook by the Russians was after the election was over. If you can believe that. Oh, what good did that do? Right. And really what they're trying to do is just stir things up and really confuse people. So they had ads supporting Trump. They had ads supporting [00:06:00] Clinton and just really kind of mixing it up. So that's what they're into, that's their game. And they had relatively little impact on the election. Then there are social media sites. And what we're going to talk about right now is a claim from Breitbart news. Now, if you don't know who Breitbart is, they are a conservative website that has reporters and just all kinds of great stuff. Breitbart himself passed some years back, but it has continued on and a few days after the 2016 election, and the internal meeting was leaked to Breitbart news. So there were top Google executives, including Sundar P Shai, Sergey, Brin, and Kent Walker. And they were just horrified that president Trump had [00:07:00] won and the top Google executives were comparing Trump voters to extremists and they discussed in the meeting, how they could make Trump's election and the populist movement, a blip in the history. Now. This is all documented. Now Google top executives on record saying, uh, yeah. We're, we're just, uh, yeah. Yeah. We're gonna make sure that Trump doesn't get reelected basically. So now it's four years later and Google is now deliberately working to interfere with the reelection of President Trump. And apparently there are several ways that Google's interfering. Now. This is all from Breitbart. I checked on some of these stats they do appear to be correct. Okay. But the, uh, the article call that I'm referring to here that you'll find on my website is focusing primarily [00:08:00] on political search bias. So if you're a business or you're a political campaign, how are we going to get the word out? What are you going to get the word out by putting up a website, maybe doing some advertising, trying to drive people to your website, all of the big political campaigns I'm doing that for a long time. Of course, smaller ones can't necessarily afford some of those things. So, what does Breitbart do? Well, they do the exact same thing. They have a website and they have run some ads in the past. I don't think they're running them right now for reasons. I think that will become apparent to you as we go through this a little bit more, but there are search results are King here. Now, remember Google owns the two top search engines in the world. Yeah. You heard it right. Google owns not just Google, [00:09:00] but YouTube. How much of the market do they have? When it comes to searches, it is absolutely amazing. It is absolutely huge. So they have a collective share between Google and yeah. YouTube of about nothing. 92% of all searches performed in the world. Can you believe that? Absolutely amazing. 92%. So if you want to go online and you want to find out about, well, let's say, vice president, Joe Biden, who's running for the Democrats this time around, you're going to get all kinds of results on Joe Biden. And if I look them up right now and just type in Joe Biden here into Google, I get an ad from old Joe Biden, official team Biden, and another one, Joe [00:10:00] Biden for president donate. Now, this is from the act blue website. I get some top stories. Uh, let's see, Washington post Republicans are still trying to frame Joe Biden with Ukraine, uh, political. Even further left than the Washington post-Biden, Latino community is diverse. Unlike the African American community K N surprisingly enough, Fox news Ben Shapiro Warren's Biden falling apart after bizarre interview. Maybe that's because they know my leanings here. Okay. And then they give a few different things on Twitter here for Biden, Joe Biden for president official campaign website. So you're going to come into this. You're going to look at it and say, Oh, there's a Wikipedia entry, which by the way, Wikipedia is political as well. Very left-wing. Uh, CNN is coming up here. New York Times. Facebook's uh, Joe [ 00:11:00] Biden's homepage on Facebook, the Hill, uh, political and another one. So that's the first page of web results for Joe Biden. When we get back, we're going to talk, talk more about this, and look at the statistics from Breitbart. When it comes to searches for Joe Biden.  You're listening to Craig Peterson. We're talking about political influence here, interference in fact, in the election. We'll be right back in a minute. Make sure you sign up. Craig peterson.com/subscribe and stick around. You're listening to WGAN. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Craig discusses how Big Tech is influencing the Election and what can be done about it. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: Average Cost of a Data Breach: $3.86 Million The Future's Biggest Cybercrime Threat May Already Be Here Election Interference: Google Purges Breitbart from Search Results Google Has Been Purging Breitbart Content from Search Results Since the 2016 Election Heads roll at Intel after 7nm delay Out-of-Date and Unsupported Cloud Workloads Continue as a Common Weakness Three people have been charged for Twitter’s huge hack, and a Florida teen is in jail Remote Work Isn’t Working? Maybe Your Company Is Doing It Wrong FBI Releases Flash Alert on Netwalker Ransomware Electric car startup Lucid is challenging Tesla’s anti-lidar stance --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Hey, the Russians are interfering with our election. But, how much of an impact are they having? Let me tell you, we got some stats here on Google that is shocking. You're listening to Craig Peterson here on WGAN of course, online on your favorite podcasting app. I'd love for you to follow me and following me and subscribing to me. And my podcast really, really helps because that shows me that hopefully, you're listening. Right. I don't really know, but it does show people that I have a good show that's worth listening to, because of those stats. Right. It would really help me. I appreciate it. It would be a wonderful thing. Share it with your friends and family. Isn't that what they say all the time.  [00:01:00] So back to this article here. This is, again from Breitbart, and it's talking about election interference. One of the things that are absolutely not shocking to me is that Google is interfering in elections all over the country and has been for a couple of years. About two years ago, I talked about a study and I showed it, I think it was Orange County, California that was showing what Google was doing to conservative results. Now, I don't know why. Right? Because Google and Facebook both said, Hey, we're not going to interfere so much, especially Facebook. And Facebook, this week started interfering. They deleted one of president Trump's accounts, Twitter. Suspended him, uh, his account until he deleted it himself. It's incredible. [00:02:00] What's going on right now, but before the break, we were talking about search visibility. Because that's how we are found online. Right, sir, ginger, and optimization. One of the things, every business I haven't considered a man maybe tried to do, it's a little harder to do today than it was 20 years ago. But it is something that you pretty much have to do. You have to look at it and say, well, how is a search engine going to look at and grade what I'm doing here? Well, new data is showing that Google has suppressed Breitbart's search visibility by 99.7%. Since the last presidential election cycle. You heard that right! Google suppressed bright Bard search by 99.7% since. [00:03:00] The last election. So they have posted some statistics using third-party software and third-parties statistical analysis, which I think is important too. Right. We don't just take  Breitbart's word or some of this stuff. So in 2016, Breitbart ranked in the top 10 search positions, in other words, above the fold for 355 key search terms. But now Breitbart is ranking in the top 10 search positions for only one search terms. So they went from 355 key search terms. So if you typed in this term 355 terms that they were trying to be known for, you would see Breitbart in the top 10. And now there's only one that it shows up for. Isn't that amazing. [00:04:00] So, uh, back in 2016, uh, Breitbart ranked in the top 100 search positions for 17,000 key search terms. But now. By bark ranks in the top 100 positions for only 55 search terms. Are you listening? Are you paying attention to these numbers, election interference by the Russians, which was denied by everyone who testified to shifts committee? Now that we have those transcripts out, every last one of them said they knew of no evidence of any collusion with the Russians. And yet we're looking at these sorts of numbers in 2016, before the top executives at Google had their little meeting saying we got to do something about Donald Trump and my words here, make sure he doesn't get reelected Breitbart, which is a conservative website, went from having almost 17,000 key search terms. [00:05:00] That it was known for in the top hundred service search position down to 55. Amazing, absolutely amazing. So organic search traffic to Breitbart is down 63%. Again, comparing it back to 2016 and you look at some of these charts and I'm going to pull one up here on my screen and it is shocking. So in 2017, Google had what they called. It's Fred update. Google does updates to its algorithms, to its programs, and they do a couple of times a year-ish. Sometimes they do it more. So in 2017 that Fred update. Dropped their visibility. So this is a visibility index published by a third party showing that goo, that Breitbart was up at seven. And then after that Fred update, they dropped down to four in their visibility, and then we move into 2018. [00:06:00] And it's still in between one and two on this visibility index out of seven. And then it drops down to little less than, yeah. Like, um, looks like about 0.1 and then in July, 2019 updated had a little tick up uptick and then. One way down. So what does way down mean? They've got these maps up on their website showing what's been happening. The first drop took place, as I said shortly after the 2016 election, the second took place in July of 2019 and the third in may of this year. So unless you type Breitbart into the search bar, You're highly unlikely to get any bright Bart content search results, and Breitbart search results for Joe Biden and other Biden related search terms have gone to zero, absolutely zero and E that's true. [00:07:00] Even if you search for Breitbart news headlines, you probably won't find them in Google search. That's how bad it is. So Google killed all search fuck to Breitbart for Joe Biden and Joe Biden related searches. It's just absolutely amazing. So on May 1st Google searches for Joe Biden generated about 30,000 impressions for bright bark links. That means that w Breitbart was shown 30,000 times after May 5th. Both impressions and clicks went to zero. Yeah, they, they spoke Breitbart spoke to a 25-year industry veteran who analyzes traffic from Google's own website portal, their, their search console. And he said he had never seen anything, anything like this graph and it indicates highly probable manipulation on the part of Google. [00:08:00] It's really, it's a wholesaler. And the search engine experts said he's never seeing such a wholesale removal of rank and visibility on specific concepts on a site. But he, that he's seen here applied to Breitbart. It's absolutely amazing. Yeah. The percentage of traffic to Breitbart from Google search 9% is just a fraction of the average publishers, which is 30 to 50%. In fact, in the New York times, their percentage is currently 40%. At the moment Google's responsible for 9% of Breitbart's traffic and youtube is sending a negligible amount if any. So it looks like Breitbart's listed on one or more of Google's blacklists, hidden away, nothing to see here. All we're doing is interfering with an election. Which they have done before. Plenty of evidence. I've seen studies out of universities on this over the years, we've got to do something about this. What. I'm sorry, I don't have a great answer for, I think maybe we just take away their immunity from prosecution. Maybe that will wake them up a little bit. [00:09:00] Hey, when we come back, we're going to talk about Intel. Why is Intel on such a downward trend? This is not investment advice, but uh, Hey, some heads of rolling over there at Intel. I think we're seeing major changes on the horizon and I'll tell you why. You're listening to Craig Peterson here on WGAN and online@craigpeterson.com. Stick around. We'll be right back. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Craig discusses the Failure to Innovate at Intel and why that has heads rolling this week.  For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: Average Cost of a Data Breach: $3.86 Million The Future's Biggest Cybercrime Threat May Already Be Here Election Interference: Google Purges Breitbart from Search Results Google Has Been Purging Breitbart Content from Search Results Since the 2016 Election Heads roll at Intel after 7nm delay Out-of-Date and Unsupported Cloud Workloads Continue as a Common Weakness Three people have been charged for Twitter’s huge hack, and a Florida teen is in jail Remote Work Isn’t Working? Maybe Your Company Is Doing It Wrong FBI Releases Flash Alert on Netwalker Ransomware Electric car startup Lucid is challenging Tesla’s anti-lidar stance --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] You remember those Intel inside commercials, they used to be all over the place. Stickers on computers as well. Things are changing in a big way for Intel You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN and of course, online Craig peterson.com. You'll find all of my shows, interviews, et cetera. Over in podcast form on your favorite podcast app. If you would, I hope I've earned a five star from you. Go ahead and give me that little rating. I know I'd love to see it. Just go to Craig peterson.com/itunes, and give me a five-star rating with a great comment. I'd love to do that. I'd love for you to do that again, Craig Peterson.com/itunes. It's pretty quick and easy to do now. [00:01:00] Intel has it's been around for a long time. Intel used to be a memory company. And they got approached to make some processors. If you ask me, they've never been a particularly great processor company. I think they made some fundamental mistakes. They've basically stuck with an architecture that's 40 years old now.  I think that's really handicapped them. They are doing a lot of work in what's known as the SIS arena which are these complex chips versus what's happening now everywhere else. Look at that Android phone that you have, those Android phones are not using any of these Intel chips. They might use a well an RF chip, radio-frequency chip. But they're not using any of the main core type stuff. [00:02:00] Many of the most phone makers now are using like the Qualcomm snapdragons they're using. Samsung has her Exynos. Kirin has one they're high silicone. These are all mobile processors that are used for a lot of different devices that are out there. Of course, Apple has their own too. Right now. I think it's the A12 Bionic is what they call it. Very, very good processors. And they are using a completely different concept from Intel. They are using a concept of the more simple, the design of the processor, the faster we're going to be able to make it. So they let the compilers that compile the software to make the binary executable that you're using. [00:03:00] They had the compilers do most of the work. And you look at the statistics between Cisco and risk. And, uh, you could argue in some cases is faster, but overall the risk is faster. Plus these risk chips tend to be a lot cheaper. Now, part of what we have in the chip Wars is the need for speed and also so less consumption of electricity. And lower consumption. Electricity also typically means lower temperatures. So you don't have to cool them as much. So if you have a mobile device, you wanted to use less power and have less heat so that you can run it longer, right? Wouldn't you rather have a laptop that ran for 1224 hours than one that just ran for an hour or two? [00:04:00] So way back when Apple switched from IBM's PowerPC design. Okay. Over to Intel chips and one, yeah, the main reasons it did that is because at IBM not delivering on low power consumption processors. Now the power chips are. Amazing amazing. And if you have a server or a desktop and that your software will run on power chips, there is nothing better. I'm just shocked and amazed running Linux on some of these machines, right? Uh, IBM has done an amazing job with that processor, but because you couldn't put one of these processors, IBM power processors reasonably into a laptop, Intel said, Hey, um, You either have to cut the power consumption and the heat generation, or we're going to have to move. [00:05:00] And IBM did not meet the deadlines. I'm making a very long story kind of short. And so Apple said goodbye and ended up switching over to Intel who could deliver the power consumption. Apple had been asking for not, not as good as they had asked for, but much, much better than the power PC. As time has gone on these chips are getting faster because of the types of processes that are involved in the manufacturing. There is. Just to simplify everything. Uh, the thickness of it, the wafers and of the layers makes a very big distance difference because the distance that the electricity has to flow inside of the chip equates to the speed of the chip and can also equate to the resistance the chip provides, which means more heat and more power. [00:06:00] So you want these chips to be smaller and smaller and have smaller and smaller innards if you will. So, uh, Intel has been promising for a long time that it would have what is called seven-nanometer parts. Well, um, Intel has had just endless problems with. Manufacturing some of these chips. So back in 2013, Intel's original roadmap was just spent 25th, 2014, 2015 to come up with a 14-nanometer node and then moved to 10 nanometers in 2016, 17, but they had an endless string of problems and setbacks with this 10 nanometer. [00:07:00] So Intel ended up spending five years. With 14 nanometer nodes, which means. Again, more power consumption and more heat and not as fast. So in 2019, they started to deliver, it was kind of shaky here, 10 nanometers. So I don't want to get into this cause, you know, no, I can hear people kind of the brains tuning out a little bit on this and Intel still doesn't have 10 nanometers, desktop or server parts. And now what they really need is something to compete because AMD advanced micro devices whom I've liked for many, many years. Has really returned to another golden age. They had some amazing processors. AMD had 64-bit processors before Intel and Intel. When they came out with 64-bit processors had to be AMD compatible. That's how far behind Intel was? How was that for an embarrassment, right. Intel considering themselves. You know, the creator and the arbitrator of these 80 series, if you will, uh, chips that are out there, um, Having to follow the lead of their biggest competitors. You're in the marketplace. Very, very, very bad. [00:08:00] So AMD now has this, what they're calling Zen architecture, and their thread ripper core counts. It's just clean. Amazing, and MDs is even starting to get attention from laptop OEMs as well. Intel also missed out on the smartphone revolution. So they have been getting black guy after black, after black guy. And what's the latest Intel is being completely dumped by Apple. Apple has built its own design house, using these simpler designs, which are using a much tighter process than Intel has. They're much cheaper to build. They use less electricity, it goes on and on and on. So it Apple has his own arm design house for the iPhone and iPad. [00:09:00] It's going to be upscaling these arm chips to the Mac, laptops, and desktops. And we're going to see. Two of those models this year. So guess what people have been losing their jobs over at Intel? What a fiasco over there. It's just absolutely crazy. Right? When we come back, we've got a lot to talk about. Um, We'll talk a little bit about the Twitter hack and remote working here. Is it not working for you and your company? We'll talk about the likely reasons. Why so stick around. You're listening to Craig Peterson right here on WGAN. Make sure you subscribe. Craig peterson.com/subscribe and get my weekly newsletter. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Craig discusses some of the issues that businesses are having with Remote workers and why.  For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: Average Cost of a Data Breach: $3.86 Million The Future's Biggest Cybercrime Threat May Already Be Here Election Interference: Google Purges Breitbart from Search Results Google Has Been Purging Breitbart Content from Search Results Since the 2016 Election Heads roll at Intel after 7nm delay Out-of-Date and Unsupported Cloud Workloads Continue as a Common Weakness Three people have been charged for Twitter’s huge hack, and a Florida teen is in jail Remote Work Isn’t Working? Maybe Your Company Is Doing It Wrong FBI Releases Flash Alert on Netwalker Ransomware Electric car startup Lucid is challenging Tesla’s anti-lidar stance --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Are you like millions of people around the world that's working from home. Maybe your company isn't doing such a great job at it. We'll talk about the reasons why. Hey, welcome back, Craig, Peterson here. WGAN. Glad to have you along today. It's been a great two hours. I'm on every Saturday from one til 3:00 PM. I really appreciate you guys being with me. I would urge you, if you would, please do me a favor and give me a five-star review, go to Craig peterson.com/itunes. They still are kind of the 800-pound gorilla, let me know right there. Let other people know what do you enjoy about the show. Craig peterson.com/itunes. And I'd love to hear from you if you have any questions by all means. Just send me an email to me. M E at Craig Peterson.com. I don't know sometimes I think it's cool. Sometimes I think that's maybe a little confusing for people. [00:01:00] Early on July 31st here this year. The FBI, IRS, US Secret Service, and Florida law enforcement can you can believe all of that. Placed a 17-year-old of Tampa, Florida under arrest named Graham Clark. He's accused of being the mastermind behind the biggest security and privacy breach in Twitter's history. He took over the accounts of President Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Kanye West, Apple, and more. He was trying to perpetrate a huge Bitcoin scam. Now he got away with some money. Got away with probably $120,000 that can never be returned to the people who he bilked it out of because it's basically impossible to send some of this stuff back. [00:02:00] We'll see what happens. I'm sure the Secret Service can figure it out. They're the ones usually involved, with that sort of thing. So shortly after this Tampa arrest, two more individuals were formally charged by the US Department of Justice. A 22-year-old Nima Fazeli in Orlando, and a 19-year-old, Mason Sheppard in the UK. They went by some hacker aliases, as they often do Taiwan, according to the DOJ. Let's see two individuals in total are in custody. This is as of a couple of days ago, and an unidentified minor in California also admitted to federal agents that they'd help them access Twitter counts. So there you go. We'll kind of leave it at that. There's a lot of details. If you want to look it up the line, but you're listening here, right? And that's all you need, frankly. They're facing five years in prison, a $250,000 fine. For one count of computer intrusion, that's Fazeli. Shepherd is being charged with computer intrusion, wire fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering. [00:03:00] The most serious of which comes with a 20-year sentence and a $250,000 fine here in the US. Apparently some of these guys were just middleman for the scam. It's really fascinating when you dig right into it. Absolutely fascinating. Okay. Let's get into this because many of us are working from home and it's working for some of us, it's not working for others. The obvious thing is what I talked to Matt about on Wednesday morning, this last week. For the employee, the downside is you're always at work, right? If you're working from home, technically you're always at work and many businesses have been taking advantage of that. [00:04:00] Having employees handle things after hours, that they normally would not be handling so that's a big downside. Then there are many other downsides too. When a business has just taken the way they do business, all of their processes and tried to put them on top of you working from home. So let's talk about some of the problems people have been having. This is based on an article out of the New York times that came out here this last week by Claire Kane Miller. In most surveys, people say that even when it's safe for offices to reopen, they want to return, only part of the time, and continue working at home several days a week, right? We've heard that before. I think that's a good thing. Now, personally, I've been working at home seven days a week for over 20 years. Okay. I'm used to that sort of stuff. But when we're talking about a normal white-collar office, one of the biggest problems they have is you just don't have that physical office space anymore. [00:05:00] You don't have the water cooler, you don't have the conference rooms. You can't just drop in on a colleague and chat. Sometimes the most productive time is when you're talking about the kids and what they're doing, and then you get that click. Where you say, Oh yeah, you know what? Hold on. I gotta go take care of this right now. Has that happened to you? It must've right. It's like in the shower, I have some of the best ideas sometimes. So what we found now is that companies that have changed the ways that they work have had much more success with people working at home. In some cases, they've discovered new ways that they want to continue when they return to the office. So all of that I think is really good news, but you have to be paying attention and you have to make sure that you are doing the right things when it comes to meetings. Okay. [00:06:00] Here are the things that successful businesses have in common, fewer meetings that are long or large, or back to back. Cut back on the meetings. You probably never needed them in the first place. They have meeting-free time for focused work, which I think is hugely important. So that you can sit there and focus and not be having to run into one meeting or another. They offer flexible work hours. In some cases, they kind of take advantage of those flexible work hours. [00:07:00] As I already mentioned, the best companies are finding ways for colleagues to socialize when they're not seeing one another in person. Now I've seen some businesses that literally have parties. You go out and you buy your beer and you show up on zoom. Hopefully not more than a beer, right? Zoom is very common, but if you have any concerns about security don't ever, ever, ever use Zoom. We'll see what happens if Microsoft takes them over, but we're months away from that. So stick with either the WebEx, it's teams, which is the one I use. It's the only one that has certifications from the federal government for every security standard you can think of including HIPAA and PCI. Okay. [00:08:00]So next here, what we're looking at is remote work during a pandemic is not actual remote work. Because we've got also because of the pandemic, the circumstance of crisis. We don't have the childcare we had before. A lot of people are very worried about this COVID. I'm quite sure by the way that I had, as the whole, COVID thing, COVID-19. They came out with a new list of symptoms just this last week.  I never had the cough symptom, but I had a half a dozen of the other symptoms that they just released. I'm pretty sure I had it. But many people are absolutely paranoid about it. You've seen videos or you've heard about people that are, macing other people cause they don't have a mask on. Even though the science on masks is divided, but seems to be leaning towards, they're not going to stop you from getting sick. Also the inability to work in person, even if it's desirable. So those are part of the problems companies are having to deal with. We'll see what ends up happening. Some of the bigger companies who started remote work said it failed, but one of the reasons it failed is they didn't build the right kind of culture that supported it. [00:09:00] At Microsoft, these teams realized large meetings of an hour or more with vague agendas worked even less. Online, back to back meetings were problematic too. Office people rely on breaks walking from one meeting to the next, use of the bathroom, eat a snack, or check their phones. Many people, if you're on a call center, like one of my daughters is, she's frustrated because they don't get any breaks. Now they used to get a much more break time when they're in the office than they're getting now, but their phone lines are also being overloaded. I think that's part of the problem now. [00:10:00]Here's the good news. They had a look at a 400 person team, and they've seen an 11. Now, this is using a team's application from Microsoft. They've seen a little 11% decrease in hour-plus meetings and a  22% increase in 30-minute meetings. That's interesting. Cause the 30-minute meeting is going to be very long tail. It's going to be to the point. You're not going to be messing around as much, not as much time wasted. One-on-one meetings have increased by 18%. So keep that in mind. There is a different way that people work when they're remote working, cut back the long meetings, cut back the back to back, eliminate those. And allow these people to have the little 30 minute meetings. They've also found that these little social video meetings, like logging on while people are eating lunch and they can chat. [00:11:00] Fridays in some of these companies have been designated as no meeting days, so people can focus on a project or recharge. When there's no office to leave the lines between work and life blur, they saw at Microsoft a 52% increase in online chats between 6:00 PM and 10:00 PM. So shifting hours can be helpful, but can also be problematic. There are smaller companies that are finding kind of the same things. Some of these companies, particularly the smaller ones, tried letting people pick their hours, allowing them to do afternoons or entire days off but became just too much for a problem to collaborate all of that stuff together. So interesting stuff. I think all of those points are major. If you're having problems with your business work from home. Have a look at the meetings and the meeting schedules and the people. Have a view parties online, have lunch online so people can chat while they're having lunch. You have been listening to Craig Peterson Here online and on WGAN. I appreciate you being with me. Make sure you join me and Matt Gagnon on Wednesday at seven 34. [00:12:00] We'll be talking about next week's articles in the news and of course, join me here or on my podcast. You'll get all of the latest news in a lot more depth. Also, make sure you get my newsletter. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Have a great week, everybody. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Good morning everybody! I was on with Matt this morning and we had a good discussion about Google and how they are interfering in our election process.  Then we got into the rising costs for businesses when it comes to data breaches. We wrapped up my segment with a discussion on Businesses and Remote work and what improvements can be made.  Let's get into my conversation with Matt on WGAN. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Craig Peterson: Hey, Craig Peterson here. I was on with Matt this morning, covering the state of Maine and parts of New Hampshire. We talked about the average cost of a data breach going up. We got into the election interference. Google is showing us via some real stats that are out there. Yeah. Google is interfering. We've got the three people that were charged for the Twitter hack. If remote work isn't working for you. Hey, I got some tips Wednesday morning and you know what time it is because Craig Peterson is with us. He's joining us as he always does it this time on Wednesdays to go over what's happening in the world of technology. Matt Gagnon: Craig, how are you, sir? Craig Peterson: Of course he is. I'm doing well. Power's back on. It came on about four this morning, so that's good news. And I did get all for those little wondering all my beehives strapped down. So they wouldn't get blown all over the place with the wind last night. That was crazy. [00:01:00] Excellent news. I'm glad to hear that. So let's talk about data breaches because I know that, this is increasingly a concern for many businesses and when you have a big data breach like that, it is incredibly expensive for you as a not. It is and it's going up, which is really a surprise for many businesses. Right now, this is a study that was done by IBM. They're showing that the cost of a data breach, on average, is about 3.86 million, almost $4 million. The average cost of a breach. And the reason it's going up is so many businesses are deciding that somehow the cloud, as it were, is some sort of a panacea. And I just want to remind everybody the cloud is just a word for a rented computer that's all it is. You still have to make sure you've got your patches done. You still have to make sure it's configured. Really the number of Amazon cloud services that have exposed data is absolutely astounding. [00:02:00] Just like last week we found these VPN services that said they were not loggers that were logging. We found all of that information out because of a misconfigured cloud server. So you've got to really be careful with that. it's absolutely amazing. Amazing how we're just still not paying enough attention to this Matt Gagnon: Craig Peterson, joining us as he always does on Wednesdays at this time, going over what's happening in the world of technology. We talked a little bit about this, I think last week, Greg, not this specific story, but this subject and this topic, this idea of tech companies and how they're managing speech online. And, I had mentioned off-hand this thing about Google, basically blacklisting, Breitbart, among others. It's not just them, but, it's a, their latest move to try to, in their words, at least as, try to STEM the tide side of misinformation and crazy things. Yeah. Being set on the internet about, about politics. And that is an extremely dangerous little precedent they've set there. [00:03:00] So tell us exactly what they did and why and where we're going to go from here with this. Craig Peterson: Yeah. This is really something. This is really in followup to what we talked about last week. Cause I figured I shouldn't dig into this more, cause I had heard a little bit about Breitbart and what their complaints were. But when you start getting right down to this. The statistics are amazing. So the best source for this information that I found was Breitbart themselves because they can log how many hits they have, where does it go, come from? What searches were being used. So after May's core search update on May 5th, this year, all of his shotgun, Google search results for Joe Biden never showed Breitbart at all period. [00:04:00] So Google searches, no Matt Gagnon: Breitbart wasn't writing on Biden, right? Craig Peterson: They had been showing about 30,000 impressions for Breitbart links, which is just nice. That's a nice number then after May 5th, both impressions and clicks went to zero. Now that's from a third party company that monitors that sort of stuff. And looking at some stats here. This is a quote from Dr. Epstein who was looking at some of these stats. He said for the New York Times, the percentage of traffic that's being routed to them, I'm Google on. Joe Biden is about 39%. And right now, overall, of course, Joe Biden, zero going to Breitbart. Zero, going to this fairly right-wing website. [00:05:00] I think we can agree. But at the moment, Google is responsible for just 9% of Breitbart traffic. So New York times 40% from Google and Breitbart 9%. Matt Gagnon: Curious to say the least Craig Peterson or tech guru joins us periodically on Wednesdays to go over what's happening in the world of technology. The other thing I wanted to talk about, speaking of politics here, it's politics, but this Twitter hack that happened a while ago, certainly embroiled a lot of political figures. I know Barack Obama was one of them and it was all about. Bitcoin money and we've apparently found yeah, the hackers and, who are they? Craig Peterson: Yeah, we really did. the FBI IRS secret service, Florida law enforcement. They're all working together to try and find out what happened here, because it looks like the source was in Florida. This is another warning for businesses out there, but for individuals as well. Because what happened here was a spear-phishing attack against some of the Twitter employees, some specific employees. [00:06:00] So a 17-year-old kid he's out of operating Tampa Florida. Name's Graham Clark. He's accused of being the mastermind behind what was the biggest security and privacy breach in history. It was you mentioned Obama included Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Kanye West, Apple, and the bottom line is he was able to convince some people that he was from Twitter IT. So Twitter, the information technology, the support people, and Twitter contacted enough. People in Twitter, got them to give him this. God mode is what I call it. Access was, let them see everything, do everything, et cetera. So he got a couple of his buddies involved, you know what? 17-year-old wouldn't and this whole phone spear-phishing attack. [00:07:00] Where against calling on the phone. Hey, I'm from IT. We're going to be doing an upgrade two Microsoft on your machine tomorrow. So I want to test it out. I need to know what your username or password is so that I can get on and make sure that Microsoft update works properly. That's happening every day right now, Matt. Matt Gagnon: And Craig, final question for you before I let you go. We've obviously all had to deal in the last several months with the whole work from home phenomenon and everyone is dealing with the remote office. Yeah. Even still, and now the kids are going back to school. I have this nagging suspicion. It's going to be yet again, a little bit of a boomerang and there's going to be more people working from home, yet again. what's interesting about this though, is that some companies are finding, it's not all it's cracked up to be. Craig Peterson: Yeah, it's not. And those companies tend to be companies that took all of their policies and procedures and everything that they were using in the office and pushed it home, The biggest one being how many meetings people used to have to go to. [00:08:00] It was just crazy. And so they pulled that into the virtual environment and are running it on one of these teams, apps are having to forbid on zoom and they've found that these types of companies that haven't rethought, how do our employees work? What's the best workflow we can possibly have to make our business work. Those companies that haven't really thought about it, have found some decreases. So one, a 400 person team that was looked at was using, the team app from Microsoft and seeing, I know 11% decrease in hour-plus meetings and a 22% increase in 30-minute meetings. that tends to be a good thing. They also found that their one on one meetings have increased by 18% because you're not bumping into people at the water cooler. [00:09:00] So if you do have people working from home, step back for a minute, have a look at everything that's going on. Realize that it's the same as people being in the office from their workflow standpoint and make some changes. And you might find that job even though it wasn't working out so well for you before things are going to improve on the worker's side, though. The problem is if you're working at home, you just can't ever leave the office. Matt Gagnon: It's a never-ending office, right? Craig Peterson: Yeah. It's my life has been for the last, all about it. Matt Gagnon: Craig Peterson, and you hear him on this very stage then on Saturdays at one, o'clock where he talks about these issues in much more depth. Craig, we appreciate you giving me a preview of them here this morning as we do every Wednesday. And we'll talk again next week, sir. All right. Craig Peterson: And of course, as you said, Saturday at one. Matt Gagnon: Indeed. Thanks a lot, Craig. Craig Peterson: Hey, we lost power with that whole wind thing going on. And I had to reboot everything in the studio, get it back online. It's been one of those mornings, you know how that all goes. All right, everybody. [00:10:00] We are working where we've recorded on video the last three weekend shows and we haven't put them anywhere yet. We've so got some stuff to work out and figure out, but it's coming. We have all, a lot of stuff in the works right now. So keep an eye out, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter and find out about all of these free pieces of training and all of the stuff going on. Craig, Peterson.com/subscribe. It's just that easy. And of course, thanks for listening. ---  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Good morning, everybody. I was on with Jim Polito this morning and we discussed Big Tech censoring conservative powerhouse Breitbart and What is happening with Tik Tok - President Trump, Microsoft, and China. Here we go with Jim. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com ---  Automated Machine Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Craig Peterson: If you, go ahead and even censor, certain types of things, obviously there's a liability, but there is no liability for any of these big guys, including Google. Good morning, everybody. Craig, Peterson here. Hey, I got into a couple of, I think of really important topics with Mr. Jim Polito this morning. And so we're going to get into those right now. Jim Polito: Here is the man behind it all pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. No, he's pulling back the curtain and showing us the man, our good friend, and tech talk guru. Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir. Craig Peterson: Hey, more name it's kinda rainy. This is going to be quite today. [00:01:00] Jim Polito: Yes, I'm not happy that we're getting a storm, but at least the storm is coming during the day better than overnight in the dark and the like. So we'll ride it out just like we're going to ride out the whole TikTok story. we'll get to that cause I can't wait to hear your insights on TikTok. But first I want to ask you about this Google censoring, Breitbart. Didn't, we just have a hearing in front of Congress, where Republicans were concerned that big tech is censoring conservative voices. [00:02:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah, this is a very big deal because Google has been concerned about President Trump's winning for years. In fact, they were involved in beforehand and when President Trump got elected in 2016, an internal meeting that was leaked to Breitbart, itself, top Google executives lamented President Trump's victory and compared Trump voters to extremists. They said back in 2016 that they really wanted to make Trump's election and the populous movement a blip in history. So we know what their intent was. Jim. Jim Polito: Yeah. Yeah, hence these hearings. Look, they're a private company and private companies can censor whichever way they want, but you also risk, being considered a monopoly and being broken up due to antitrust laws. [00:03:00] Craig Peterson: Then there's a law on the books that's been around in the earlier days with the internet that it says these types of companies are basically exempt from all of the rules that you would normally be covered under. So you've been in the press, you've been on television, you're on the radio now. There are libel laws and slander laws. and if you repeat something, if you, go ahead and even sensor, certain types of things, obviously there's a liability, but. There is no liability for any of these big guys, including. Google. So there's a chart I'm looking at here that we're going to put up on the website and it's talking about the Sistrix visibility index. So this ranks a website's visibility in Google and what it does is it does Google searches every so often and tries to see where the results are. So I'm looking at an article here on Breitbart news, showing this visibility index, cause anybody that publishes online is going to pay really close attention to this sort of thing. What we're finding on this index is it's absolutely nuts but Breitbart, it was going up a few ups and downs. Think of it as a stock market. Then Google had an update in 2017 called Fred. All of a sudden it started to drop and then right around the end of 2017, the visibility index went from 7 which is absolutely huge. [00:04:00] I love to have a seven down all the way in now where it's almost zero. Wow. Jim Polito: Wow. Craig Peterson: Yeah. the search visibility has just dropped off and Google just killed all the search traffic to Breitbart when it comes to Joe Biden and any Joe Biden related searches. and that happened about May 5th this year. So there they are obviously censoring. It really is. It really is. So Breitbart. I'm looking at what they've published here showing their number of clicks. They're showing that they were getting about 1200 clicks a day for people searching for Joe Biden, May 5th. It went from 1200 the prior days down to zero. Jim Polito: My God.  [00:05:00]You've got to look at something like that and say, this is pathetic and this is truly manipulating the news. When you're Google, when you're the pro these figures off the top of your head, I'm sure. But what percentage of the search market share. They have just in the United States. What percentage of it? Craig Peterson: Remember too, Google also owns YouTube. Google's number one in the US and YouTube is number two in the US and together they garner almost 90% of all search traffic. Jim Polito: That's bordering on antitrust. I know as you explained, they are exempt from the legislation, you know what it's time to update the legislation. [00:06:00] Don't you think? Not that I'm a heavy regulation guy, but when you've got something like that going on in the marketplace, and you can say somebody else could do it better. Yeah but I happen to be in antitruster. Craig Peterson: Yeah. Yeah. It's a really interesting problem. Look at the New York times percentage, they get about 40% of their traffic from Google, and now Googles responsible for 9% of Breitbart's traffic. This percent of any traffic about Joe Biden. Jim Polito:  There is no doubt in my mind that the New York times is the left equivalent of the right, Breitbart. Craig Peterson: Yes, Absolutely. My wife this morning was reading an article about an NBC producer who just left NBC news. Might want to look this thing up. Jim Polito: No, I read it. I read it very interesting. [00:07:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah. Yeah. It's these people are out there looking for fringe information on the left, but ignoring stream stuff like Breitbart on the right. Jim Polito: Yeah, they are, then they will publish anything, fringe, anything that fits the agenda. All right. Let's get to my favorite, which is TikTok. I have a very funny story for you about TikTok. My two sons were shocked to hear that I was on TikTok and I said to them, gentlemen, My TikTok is much different than your TikTok. And they said, what do you mean? I said I don't get dancing girls. Girls doing dances for the camera. I get stuff on politics, home improvement, old TV shows. They said, yeah. Oh, that's on there. All of that stuff is on there.  What frightens me though? About my TikTok experiences up until a little while ago. I never really liked the videos. [00:08:00] I just went to the for you feed. I gotta tell you, Craig, TikTok knew exactly who I was and exactly what I wanted to see. Craig Peterson: They've been really good about that. That's why they've become so popular. They really can tell what you want. They watch what you're watching. Jim Polito: Yeah. Craig Peterson: The President has is what are they doing outside of that application? Jim Polito: Yeah, Craig Peterson: That's where our real problem comes in. So apparently, first of all, from a technology side, they have been caught multiple times stealing information from anybody that has TikTok installed on their phones. Most recently they were stealing your copy buffer. [00:09:00] So let's say that you've gone to a website on your phone and it's a legitimate bank's website and say you haven't been tricked. You're on your bank's website and it's asking for your account number. So you go when you get your account number, cause you've got it in, hopefully, one password. Maybe heaven forbid a spreadsheet or something. And so you copy it out of that. And then you go back to the bank's website because I'm not so good at remembering 15 digit numbers. So you go back to the bank's website and you paste it in. And then you go to TikTok. TikTok was caught grabbing the contents of your copy buffer. Automatically. Jim Polito: Wow. Craig Peterson: So that means any passwords you had copied, any bank information you had copied anything that was in your copy buffer TikTok grabbed. So that's just the lead. Jim Polito: I'm just trying to think on my, I copy. They're going to get a lot of 'em. They're going to get a lot of my show prep because copy, cut, and paste that into an email. [00:10:00] So I guess TikToks going to get my show prep. I o cut and paste sometimes when I get, when you're supposed to do a third-party verification when you're entering something, and you get texted you the number I will cut and paste that. Huh. So they're getting that, information. No, yeah. Websites I'm around. Okay. they're going to see me. Yeah. It's not going to be that exciting for them. Craig Peterson: They're also grabbing your personal information and then your name they'll track the GPS on it and know where your home address is. [00:11:00] National Weather Service: The national weather service in Boston has issued a tornado warning for Northwestern Hampshire County in Western, Massachusetts, Northwestern Franklin County in Western, Massachusetts until 9:30 AM. Eastern daylight time. At 8:45 AM Eastern daylight time. So if you were thunder stolen, capable of producing a tornado was located over Middlefield or 13 miles East of Pittsfield. Moving north at 45 miles per hour. Hazards include tornado. Flying debris will be dangerous to those caught without shelter. Mobile homes will be damaged or destroyed damage to roof windows and vehicles will occur. Tree damage is likely. This dangerous storm will be near Cummington around 8:55 AM. Eastern daylight time Plainfield and Holly around 9:00 AM. Eastern daylight time Charlamagne around nine, 10:00 AM. Eastern daylight time Monroe and roll around 9:15 AM. Eastern daylight time. He's around 9:20 AM. Eastern daylight time. [00:12:00] Craig Peterson: He's back in China. They're going to have to change, to use Microsoft servers based in the US as well as these other countries. So there's a lot involved. It's going to take months. Show them the bottom line is everybody is very careful. We've, I've warned about TikTok forever. I am, but, TikTok, and say that they're confident in the longterm success of the app, they deny that they are sharing any data with their owners, the Chinese communist party. They already have started moving to the US. TikTok has nearly a thousand people here and plans to hire another 10,000 employees across the US. So all of those things would move under the Microsoft umbrella. It's interesting. What can be done even if President Trump's? Yeah. Hey, you're gone. I'm banning you. At best it would be removed from the main app stores, but people still be able to get it. And as you pointed out the beginning of this whole thing, it is very addictive because they are so good at knowing what you want. [00:13:00] Jim Polito: Yeah. They are. They know exactly what I want. really. politics, everything. They're not sending me, videos that, praise AOC and Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden. Do you know what I mean? They're not, they're absolutely not. Wow. Okay. Craig, this is fascinating. and folks can always get more information from you. How would you like them to do it? Craig Peterson: How about, because I'm starting to do more training. We have spent the last two weeks and we've got the whole month of August devoted to putting together some more free pieces of training for people, as well as some paid courses. But yeah. Do you want to get these show notes? I send to Jim if you want to know about these pieces of training because we've got to bring people's level of knowledge up, go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. [00:14:00]You'll get my news, all of this stuff. Craigpeterson.com/subscribe. All right, Craig, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much for your time. We'll catch up with you next week. Hey, take care of Jim. Thanks. All right. You too. Okay. Folks, when we return a very important, fine I just realized I forgot to introduce him at the beginning. Of course, Jim Pollito on WTAG/WHYN  big powerhouse stations down in Western and central mass. Anyhow, it was a lot of fun and I really am getting busy here. I'm excited. I've wanted to do this for years with some of these pieces of training and things. So keep an eye out and do make sure you go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe, and we'll be back tomorrow. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.   ---  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome, Good Monday morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Jack Heath this morning discussing TikTok, President Trump, China and How Microsoft might play a part in a new US/Canada/Australia/New Zealand version. Here we go with Jack. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com ---  Automated Machine Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Craig Peterson: They would take over TikTok. They would literally own it and operate it in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, other countries, which are really concerned about what China's been doing. Hey, I was on this morning with Mr. Jack Heath. We even got our friend, Justin, involved. He was talking about some of these conspiracy theories regarding the White House and what they want to get rid of Tik-Tok. According to him, it's a campaign thing, but I think I straightened him out pretty well. This is Craig Peterson. I was on this morning, on New Hampshire today. And here we go with Jack Heath. Jack Heath: Speaking of Tik-Tok. We're going to go to our tech talk guy to talk a little Tik-Tok with our tech talk guy. Get it. Tech talk. Craig. Good morning. What's going on with this TikTok? I'm barely familiar with it. I know that one guy in New Hampshire though. I did remember this in the Keene area. I think does some kind of amusing, it takes images. I'm doing his music and it's he's got hundreds of thousands of TikTok viewers. [00:01:00] Justin McIssac: My, my kids have TikTok. They're both insane for every Jack Heath: tell us what it is, Justin, and then Craig can give us his take Justin McIssac: It's this video app where a, you can take video and that sound, you can add images. You can do different effects, like a green screen in the background, and they get shared, shared, and commented on and stuff like that. It is the latest craze. During quarantine, a lot of kids are doing different TikTok dances that go viral. Jack Heath:  In a creative tool with a lot of videos. Justin McIssac: Yeah. Yeah, Craig Peterson: Yeah and TikTok has built into it of all, a whole bunch of stuff. In fact, right now, if you're a musician, the place to be is TikTok. It's the number one music site right now, generally speaking. There's a lot of competitions on it where it's a, let's do this, let's do that. And so people try and one option. The other person and the kids are having a lot of fun. Jack Heath: My question in the news today, why is president speak with CEO of Microsoft about buying it? And there's a question and concern about China [00:02:00] what's going on? Craig Peterson: Yeah, this is very concerning, frankly, because it is an app and it's living on our phones and we're giving away some personal information and that's where the President's very concerned because remember now the socialist, the communist government in China has control of it every company in China. It is demanding many times from companies, complete client lists, et cetera, which is why I'm absolutely anti-Lenovo for instance, and Lenovo PCs. But with TikTok what's been happening is the kids have been using it. So we're concerned about having their usernames and the GPS coordinates being sent to China. This means that they can easily tell where people live, who their contacts are, who they're connected to in the online world. Then that's a security problem. Jack Heath: Interesting. I guess you think Microsoft is going to get involved here or not? [00:03:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah. Microsoft last week was very tight-lipped about it. This week. Microsoft has admitted that it's been talking with the whole of Whitehouse. Trying to figure out what to do here. They would take over TikTok. They would literally own it and operate it in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, other countries, which are really concerned about what China has been doing. We caught TikTok just about three weeks ago grabbing your copy buffer every second. In fact, multiple times a second, which means if you had a password that you had copied and were pasting in, or you had a bank account number that you had copied TikTok now had a copy of your bank account number, anything that you had copied to paste on your phone, right? Whether or not you're planning on pasting it into TikTok. Okay. [00:04:00] So these other countries are worried about it as well.  Microsoft is saying, yeah, we're not hot and heavy on this, but they're going to finish talking with Bytedance, which is the owner of TikTik no later than  September 15th. Six weeks minimum before anything starts happening. And then once it does start happening, it's going to take months because Microsoft says it's going to do a complete code review. Look at all of the software, look at what it's doing. But initially, what they're going to do is just try and move it all to the US on US servers. Justin McIssac: Yeah. So a couple of things here, Jack. [00:05:00] So first I think it was four to five months ago. There was a big TikTok fellowship in the US military. When troops would have downtime, they would do like silly TikTok things, which is basically what the app is ostensively for. So I think it was the US military warned all the troops to stop using TikTok. You can be giving away information to China, like where you are and things like that. Yeah, which you don't jeopardize your own different countries to have. The other thing is it's opened up a bit of a debate as maybe not a debate, but a discussion. You're giving away your information all time while you're also giving it away to Jeff Bezos and to Mark Zuckerberg and all these other people. At what point are you not giving all your data away to everybody anyway. The third thing was. I don't think we mentioned this. The president over the weekend on Friday said he was going to ban TikTok Jack Heath: Right. That's another part of this. Justin McIssac: Just wipe it out. Yeah. And, so two things from that, some of that I believe has to do with giving data away to China. The other thing was there was a viral movement on TikTok to try and, kinda mess with the different rallies. I think they got the president's attention. Jack Heath: I think there's another story. In the middle of everything you just said, Justin and Craig, and that is, I don't have a playbook for the Biden camp or the Trump camp, but I've noticed, and the President did it the other day when he was talking about Herman Cains passing. When he read, he went back to the China virus. I don't know if you caught it, and I predict, and I'm not saying it's right or wrong. I'm just saying it okay. Analysis here. As we get closer to this general election, post conventions in the, really intensifying. 2016, who talked about taking it on China, who talked about China. [00:06:00] I think President Trump is going to get, I think you just, you heard it here. It's saying right or wrong. I'm not asking you again, enter politics, but the ads that are coming out, Paul said this batch of ads you take on Joe Biden, watch for the whole China piece, right or wrong becoming a more prevalent part of the Trump campaign. That's why he mentioned the TikTok thing, the virus, stealing our intelligence, all the stuff about China. I just think it's going to be a big part of the general election. I may be wrong. There's some commentary Craig Peterson: I think your right on that. A good reason to, but I've seen it firsthand. China's stealing our stuff. It's been incredible. I've seen businesses completely turned into nothing. Destroyed because China stole their information. Justin McIssac: Jack, one thing you are saying the name wrong. Its JINA. Jack Heath: We come back. We're going to check-in [00:07:00] Craig Peterson: Hey everybody. Thanks for joining me here on the podcast to make sure you go online. You got to subscribe. We have been very busy putting some stuff together for you. Go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Right now. So you can find out about all these different free pieces of training and lives. We've got coming up. We've been working hard on getting these put together for you, and they really are going to help you with your cybersecurity in business and if you're a home user, a lot of this stuff applies to you as well. Take care, everybody we'll be back tomorrow.  

Welcome! Craig discusses the Hack that could cost you your business. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: How to find Stalkerware on your smartphone This Simple Hack Could Tank Your Business 7 VPN services left data of millions of users exposed online Universities Brand ‘Drama Therapy’ And ‘Journalism’ as STEM Majors to Circumvent Immigration Policy DoJ suggested OANN should call FBI about NPR’s tipline, emails show Google reportedly peeks into Android data to gain edge over third-party apps Russia’s GRU hackers hit US government and energy targets Your next smartphone will be a lot harder to scratch --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Hey, have you been paying attention? And I know you have, 'cause you're the best and brightest, you know about phishing and not to click on links you don't know about. there's another one, and this next one is taking advantage of your knowledge about phishing. Hey  Craig, Peterson here. Thanks for joining me. Let's talk a little bit about it. Yes, we've man, we've beaten. I think the phishing horse to death bottom line because phishing has been such a problem for so long, but for those that aren't really up-on it, you've heard the term, a little bit about, don't click on things, phishing. It has been very effective lately. We have a lot of people working from home. That's going to continue for months and years to come, frankly, a very high percentage of us. It'll just be at home, in a bedroom or in the living room on the couch. [00:01:00] That's been happening a lot. those of us who are sitting at home. Are probably not as aware as we should be to all of the problems that are going on out there. Now we have some training for employees. A lot of places have stuff. I really love what we have and we have training for if you're in HIPAA. if you are CMMC I tar D FARs, right? All of these different regulations that are out there, even PCI training that walks people through and gives them questions and reminds them about the training. If your business does not have this sort of training. Get it right? Whether you get it from me or you get it from someone else, please get that training so that you can keep up on all of these techniques. The bad guys are using phishing is where they are sending out messages, trying to get you to do [00:02:00] something right. Trying to get you to react. what kind of reaction are we talking about here? They can be just a link that you click on. The email looks legit, right? I've been getting every week email, supposedly from Amazon telling me that my. Amazon Prime membership has expired. it hasn't the card did. And now because my credit card on file has been expired. So has my Amazon membership, right? no, none of that's true, but some of these emails you take a second glance. You say, Whoa, wait a minute then. Okay. That looks legit. It's got Amazon's logo. It's worded like Amazon might word it. And then if you click on it, it's going to take you to a site that pretends to be Amazon and asks you for your credit card update. So you're going to give a credit card number you're going to give. an expiration date, right? You're going to put all of this stuff [00:03:00] in, cause you don't want to lose your Amazon prime membership. Now I'm just using Amazon prime as an example, this is happening all the way across the board with tons of. Banks credit unions. Financial institutions are a really great target. I've seen them from supposedly, right? E-bay I've seen them from the IRS law enforcement. All right. All the way across the board, it is a serious problem. So how do we deal with that problem while we care, but what we're clicking on, but I want to talk about a simple hack may not have heard about before that can just destroy your business and what it is done? What these guys are doing is called Typosquatting papal, squatting, and typos squatting is where you think you're going to google.com, but maybe you ended [00:04:00] up@googl.com. You forgot the E or maybe it's Google with three O's. Instead of google.com or if you have one of these home routers, even if you're a business and you're not using at least pro or hardware, like the Cisco go hardware. Then you've got an additional problem because what the bad guys have been doing is taking over control of your router. So many of them have never been patched via Rob, have you ever updated your rudder? Have you ever. They did the firmware new router, right? Most people don't and most rodders don't do it automatically, and they only will do it for me, maybe a couple of years, even if they do it automatically, I just had a client. We were helping out. We were grading them to the prosumer, the Cisco go hardware. And. She said, yeah, I have been, I check every week. That's how diligent she was. So [00:05:00] she went to the vendor's website, checked what the latest release of firmware was, and then checked her machine to see what release of more she had. Guess what it was the same release. But it had been two years since the manufacturer had issued any updates to the firmware. So her modem was completely vulnerable. So make sure you do have a modem that is not only up to date, but really, even for home users, you've got to get the prosumer stuff. I recommend the Cisco stuff. You don't have to get it from me. But Cisco goes something you might want to look at. You can get it online. I think it's even available on Amazon. I've seen it over there before, and it's not that much more expensive if you just buy it and do it yourself. If you want me to do it, obviously we're going to get involved to help configure it and help you install it and everything. So there are additional charges, but let's get back to typesquatting. That's [00:06:00] different than the pad guys taking over your router. And when you type in the correct google.com, you're going to two of them. Okay. Okay. Many of these types of domains. Are either purchased for resale. They redirect you to a real offer and it a shady way. Many times what they're doing is they'll use a coupon if you will code that gives them credit for the sale. So you're, you are actually going to the real Amazon. And what happens is there's a referral. Bounty, if you will, that they are paid by sending you to Amazon, even though they didn't really send you to Amazon. So there's a lot of stuff that they're doing. And so forth labs found that roughly 2.7% of 15,000 domain names that they looked at. Two and a half, 2.7% were associated with some form of [00:07:00] cybercrime, including hacking phishing online fraud or spamming. If you think that 2.7% is a small number, remember there's at least 360 million registered domain. So let's do a little bit of mathematics here. If we say (360) 100-0000. Times 0.027. So that's 2.7%. So that is nine, almost 10 million websites. If those numbers, if you can really just interpolate it across all registered domains. So there's a lot of easy examples of type typo. Squatting. Security research has found a perfect. Replica of reddit.com, Tom, which is one of the five most visited websites online under [00:08:00] reddit.co. Which is.co is Columbia's domain by the way. So they had even acquired an SSL certificate for reddit.co. So the majority of the web browsers wouldn't even tell you that there might be a problem. So we gotta be very careful. We've seen campaigns in the past for Netflix dot O M again, a typo, right? You meant to type.com Citibank dot O M. Which is, by the way, Oman's, domain suffix. Now that doesn't mean that Columbia or Oman are actively involved in this, or even that the people that did this are from Columbia or Amman. It just means it was the domain was registered there. Registrars are what it's called. Cameroon's other popular one.cm, Hulu, Netflix, 12 million visits over a three month period. That's pretty amazing here. So anyway, let's not do that. Be careful with typos [00:09:00] squatting, pay close attention. When you're typing in the URLs. I have seen based on my website, just X, a lot of people use Google. Instead of typing in the direct URL. So pay attention to that. All right. Stick around. When we come back, we've got a mortar cocktail. We're going to get into the whole VPN story this week. I've got a big I told you so pink is the bottom line here and make sure you're on my email list. You can sign up at Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Stick around because we'll be right back. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Craig explains why he knows that these commercial VPN companies are lying to you and what you can do about it. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: How to find Stalkerware on your smartphone This Simple Hack Could Tank Your Business 7 VPN services left data of millions of users exposed online Universities Brand ‘Drama Therapy’ And ‘Journalism’ as STEM Majors to Circumvent Immigration Policy DoJ suggested OANN should call FBI about NPR’s tipline, emails show Google reportedly peeks into Android data to gain edge over third-party apps Russia’s GRU hackers hit US government and energy targets Your next smartphone will be a lot harder to scratch --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] If you've been using a VPN service. My gosh, I've got news for you. We're going to talk about what happened this week. Hey, it's Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me. If you want to get my whole show, all of the segments, you'll find them online@craigpeterson.com. We're starting to do a lot more videos, so make sure you check that out. We might even be doing some of these shows live Facebook and YouTube lives as well. Let me know what you think. What's the best. A way for you to maybe watch some of this video. Is it one of these lives is just going to the website. Do you prefer, you listened to me on the radio? you can find me podcast almost everywhere and I always ask them, so your question's right here. You can just email me@craigpeterson.com. Let me know what [00:01:00] works best for you guys. Okay. I know on the radio, it's absolutely fantastic. And I have a lot of followers there and I love answering your questions. I always get back to you. It might take me a few days, depending on what's going on. Sometimes we get hot on a project or we're trying to secure a company. That's had a hack. We just had one. Where the company's CFO's laptop was having some problems. And so the MSP, the managed services provider that had them as a client called us up, knowing that we are experts in the cybersecurity front and said, Hey, what should I do? What can I do? this is it's just weird. And so we got involved and we found it, the CFO's laptop. The chief financial officer, a company that I don't know is I think it's 30 million a year. Had been hacked and had, what's known as an act of Chinese back door, which [00:02:00] means that the Chinese or getting in and looking at anything they wanted to, whenever they wanted to, et cetera, go very bad stuff. You don't want that to happen to you? That's for sure. So this is why I'm doing the training. I'm trying to help everybody understand this. We do it on the radio, but we also do it live in person on video. So we do webinars and things too, as well as our newsletter. you can get everything you want for free online and going to one place, one consistent place. you can trust somebody like me. Who has been doing it information technology for more than 40 years and has been doing cybersecurity for more than 20 years. I think I'm a good place to go. The one-stop-shop for all this information. So thanks to the seem to me here. You can hear me every week. Right here. You can go online to Craig peterson.com/subscribe bribe. And that'll get you on my newsletter [00:03:00] in the, in there, I'll have some links to some of the videos and some of the pieces of training we're doing, and I'm going to also be doing some things like the Facebook lives and other YouTube lives and things. and so if you're interested in that, make sure you let me know. I'll probably send an email out, asking people if you're interested and then I will, We'll let you know when we're going live and what the topic will be, and you can always ask questions and that's the whole idea behind those lives, right? A little bit. So, let's get into our VPN problem. I did a big training on VPNs of few times. I did 22 webinars on some training in the March timeframe this year. And VPN hands are something that almost no one really understands to me. It's been very disappointing. So let's start about, let's talk about what a VPN is. Let's start at the very beginning I had, for instance, going to my [00:04:00] home office. Back in the day, this would 30 years ago now I don't drink really? Yeah. Somewhere around 30 years ago. And I had two T-one data lines coming into my home and we were Watchers unheard of back in the day. So each of those T-one lines was about one and a half megabits. So I had almost three megabits worth of data coming in. In and out of my house and I had some web servers and I use them for my business and stuff way back then. Oh, same business I have today, by the way. And it was just funny. What was the stamp gene? How expensive it was now? I also had my main office cause I owned a building and I had 50 employees. In the building and I needed to be able to share data back and forth and have, get, have access to the file. Servers have one centralized phone system, All of that sort of stuff. And 30 years ago, the only way to do that was to have [00:05:00] lease line, come into my house, and also have a leased line going from my house to the office building. And then once it got to the building, of course, we owned the hall. Own the whole building. And back then it was all wires, little coaxial cables that ran around for ethernet and we'd got to the building and it got dispersed to the points that needed to be at and went into our data center that we have there and everything else. Along came the VPN technology. And it was a godsend because I was spending $5,000 a month to connect to my office at my house, to my office in our building. Mine. Can't in my building to my house $5,000 a month in 30, 30 years ago. Okay. So that was serious money. I don't know what 5,000 is worth today with inflation, probably 25. probably not that much, but, it's worth a lot more. So when VPNs came in [00:06:00] and internet connections got cheaper, I no longer had to pay, to have a least align, a dedicated, aligned, going from my office to my office building. Now, what I could do is just have an internet connection at both sides and then use a VPN and my networks, we're all connected. That's what VPN stands for. It's a virtual private network. It lets one point get to the other point. And the way we're using them today is where the problem starts because what we're doing now is you have a VPN then going from your home network or from your laptop to the office, you have now connected all of the devices in your home. Okay. Or on your network. If your whole network is VPN, all of those devices are now connected. To the other side where the VPN server is. [00:07:00] So if you have any malware, if you have any of these Chinese back doors, they can not only get on your computer. They can get on any computer, the VPN hooked up to if it's not configured properly if it's not monitored properly if you don't have intrusion detection and prevention systems on both sides of that VPN. And when you're using one of these free VPN services or the commercial VPN services, you don't have that at all. Now, many of us are looking at it saying, I'm using XYZ VPN. I heard it advertised here or there. My friends use it and it's five bucks a month or 10 bucks a month or 20 bucks a month. They cannot provide you with the service you need for that. And in my webinar on VPN, I actually. Break down the numbers and show you how it's completely infeasible for [00:08:00] them to provide it at those types of numbers. So what do they do? they track you. They sell your data and also the bad guys. If your VPN isn't with a bad guy, cause some of these VPNs are actually hosted by Ben, add guys to purposely track you. Okay. Purposely steal your data. Now, if you want to go where the money is, you Rob a bank, right? Isn't that the whole idea? why did you Rob banks? Because that's where the money was now. Sutton. Apparently never said that, but the concepts are a good ones. So if you want to steal people's data that people want to keep secure because they're doing banking or other things on it. Where are you going to stake out? Where are you going to put down those tent posts? Where are you going to be watching everyone going in and out? You're going to be watching the VPN server [00:09:00] at the other side. So you're paying for a VPN service or heaven forbid using a free one. And you're going from your laptop. Securely probably depends. We go into details on that in the VPN, webinar, and pieces of training, you go fairly securely from your laptop to the VPN server, which is hosted in a data center, probably a public day data center and is under attack. And if they're not maintaining that properly and they get nailed with a zero-day attack, all kinds of stuff can get exposed including you. So if you're trying to go to your bank and you're using a VPN, cause you're sitting in a cafe, you're going from the cafe. To the VPN service provider. And remember you are also now going from the VPM service provider through the internet, to your bank. These VPNs do not terminate at your bank. These VPNs [00:10:00] terminate at the VP and servers though, whoever's hosting it. So VPN mentor revealed this week. That they found seven virtual private networks left 1.2 terabytes of private user data online. 1.2 terabyte. That's a lot. Okay. A terabyte is 1,024 gigabytes. And in case you don't know, so the impacted services were UFO, VPN fast VPN free VPN, super VPN flash, VPN, secure VPN, and rabbit VPN. Now it had personally identifiable information for potentially over 20 million VPN users. Why would 20 million users email addresses home addresses passwords in plain text, by the way, IP addresses? Why would that take 1.2 terabytes? it wouldn't however, [00:11:00] they had full logs of everywhere. They went online. And all of those services that I named are quote, no-log VPN services, meaning, Oh, we don't track you. We don't log you. We're not selling your data. Guess what? This is absolute proof of that. They're not no-log that they were logging. And that probably means that they were selling that data wide log it. Why use up all of that space. If you're not going to use it somehow. So be careful guys. Okay. yeah, it's, there's a lot of detail. I've got the article up on my website@craigpeterson.com. Great article from security affairs, but, It's that's a lot of arms, one sentence. It's a real problem. VPNs are a real problem. So make sure you attend my VPN training, where we go into detail on this. I [00:12:00] don't sell a VPN. Okay. That you can use privately. We do commercial VPNs and we do them. All right. For employees. Connecting to the businesses and it has to be done, Or you are hyper exposed. Anyways, take care of everybody. Make sure you visit me online. Sign up for my email list. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. We're going to lose some radio stations. Others are sticking with me. So stick around through the news. Cause we'll be right back. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Craig finishes his discussion on Stalkerware and then gets into IOS and Android. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: How to find Stalkerware on your smartphone This Simple Hack Could Tank Your Business 7 VPN services left data of millions of users exposed online Universities Brand ‘Drama Therapy’ And ‘Journalism’ as STEM Majors to Circumvent Immigration Policy DoJ suggested OANN should call FBI about NPR’s tipline, emails show Google reportedly peeks into Android data to gain edge over third-party apps Russia’s GRU hackers hit US government and energy targets Your next smartphone will be a lot harder to scratch --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. We've been talking about stalkerware. I'm going to finish that up right now. And then we're getting into that simple hack that could tank your business. In fact, all of your retirement and savings as well. This is Craig Peterson. I'm so glad to have you guys with us today. We are also on line@craigpeterson.com. You can get my newsletter just by going to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. You'll get all of my show notes every week. The notes that I used for this show, as well as the notes that I'm using for my appearances on various radio stations throughout New England. And also now I am starting to put together some videos, little training videos that we will be releasing too. So keep an eye out for those. Let's finish up the whole thing about stock aware and iOS. Of course [00:01:00] Apple's operating system for the iPhone, as well as for the iPad. In the last segment, I told you how to get into the settings to look, to see if your device was managed. IOS is a difficult one when it comes to stock or where the easiest way for the bad guys to track you is by using mobile device management. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, so that's all well and good, right? But there are ways of hiding software on the Apple device, and it's almost impossible for you to detect it's there. That's how bad some of this stuff is. And Apple does not make it easy for you to get in and look around unlike Android, that. Pretty darn easy to get in and poke around if you know what you're doing and Apple does that, they restrict it for really good security reasons. The types of reasons that you would hope [00:02:00] Apple or one of these other companies was actually do it, which is because of course, they don't want. Bad guys doing bad things on your phone. So the access to this sort of thing is restricted. So that makes it difficult. So you might have to just go on some clues. So what are the clues? In this case, and this is true for Android. The clues are that your phone is running hot. Your phone is getting slow. You're not sure what's happening. Maybe your data plan is getting eaten up. Those are all pretty bad things to happen to you. And they're all things that might indicate that there is a problem, keyboard, keys if they have a leg. Yeah. Your type. Remember that there are no real keyboards on phones anymore. It's all touch screen. But if you're typing on that screen and you notice that it takes [00:03:00] a while. For those, it's a fraction of a second for those characters to come up. Whereas before it was instantaneous, that also could be assigned that there's a key logger on the device. All right. you're running out of space. That's a dead giveaway because if you're not downloading it a lot of stuff, why would you be running out of space on your phone? So look at all of those things also on iOS at the very top of the screen. There's a little thing that indicates that, right up here on the upper right-hand side, it indicates that their location services are being used. Now that is legitimate in some cases, but it could be a bad guy monitoring you this stock or where. So again, if you want to look at location services, If they're at least using those legitimately, you can go into your settings, location services, and you can see all of the programs that have requested [00:04:00] access to your location. And then the ones that have had it recently, we'll have a little blue arrow next to them to let you know that it's been used recently. And that's going to tell you a whole lot too. Okay. let's see. Let's move on here to our Android friends. I am not a fan, of antivirus software. Cause it's pretty much useless, but there are some things that can do if you're not doing anything to protect yourself. So on the Android side, there's Kaspersky as well as some others. Now, Apple does not allow anti-virus software. On their Apple app store for good reason, because it gained access to a lot of things that are shouldn't have access to it often can be malicious and in the iOS world as a general rule, it's not going to do any good to for you anyways, but on the. Android side. If you go to the google play store, [00:05:00] you'll see a bunch of different antiviruses. Now, Kaspersky is another one that's like antivirus, right? Kaspersky is a Russian company and they have had antivirus software for quite a while. And their antivirus software is actually illegal to use in the federal government. Now you might ask why is that the case? there are ties alleged to between Kaspersky Labs and the Russian government and maybe even the Russian mafia. That's why? So the federal government has removed Kaspersky, antivirus software from all of their devices. And frankly, you probably should too, but this is one case where again if you're not that worried about it and you like inexpensive and you don't care if the Ruski ruskis again and get access to your information, you might want to look for it for that because of Kaspersky labs. With their [00:06:00] antivirus software now has a feature that allows you to check for spyware, which is really cool. So they've really upgraded their antivirus pro, where they upgraded the software last year. And yeah, we'll tell you about stock or wherever. So those jealous partners who want to spy on their ex and lovers. They can find out. So 2018, I'm looking at some stats right now because ski lab products detected stock or whatever, programmed on 60,000, almost unique mobile devices proving the severity of the threat according to yes Bursky. So have a look at it. It is called their mobile antivirus product and they detected not a virus, colon monitor. That's what they'll do. Yeah. So I have a look at that. I am looking at their stats. There are a bunch of different pieces of spyware that they've detected. Did, stock to where is real [00:07:00] don't fool yourself. I will want to get, let you guys know about a couple of things I'm doing right now. We are going to be talking in the next segment about this simple hack that can just total your business. We're also going to be talking about VPN, but I can't dive into them at the level that I'd like to be able to hear on the radio. And if you're watching this on video, this is again, it's a short video to give you some basic understandings. So if you want more, if you want a step by step walkthrough where I am clicking on it, and you are looking over my shoulder, what I'm doing, you have to attend one of my pieces of training or watch one of the training videos if you've registered. So there is only one way to do that as well. And that is to go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Now that's going to get you on to my [00:08:00] newsletter list. Now, the newsletter list, isn't something where I'm just pounding you constantly, right? I really want to help you guys out. And I went through just yesterday. All of the. Collateral materials that we produced. Do you remember last summer? I did the security summer where we had a different white paper that we had written and distributed every day. And some of these were two pages. Some of them are five or six pages. Plus we've had small business security guides. You've got the security reboot guide. We've got a whole bunch of stuff. I counted them. There are over 50 of those that we have written and given away. Very important stuff for small businesses, very important stuff for home users as well. And you can always ignore some of that technical detail. If you're a home user, you're sitting there and say, I'm not that [00:09:00] technical. I don't know what to do. Okay. But it is very important. And if you're thinking about maybe. Not just getting into a computer security career, but make a few more bucks at the office because now you can say, Hey, I know this about security or better yet. You've taken some courses that we offer as well as others, but some courses. That you've got a certificate now, and you can get, maybe get that raise that you've been hoping to get forever. So make sure you check it out. Craig peterson.com/subscribe online, stick around. We'll be right back. When you talk about the simple hack, what are the bad guys doing right now that mess with us? --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Craig explains Hacker's new bag of tricks.  They are buying pre-made COVID-19 templates to fleece unsuspecting users.   For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: How to find Stalkerware on your smartphone This Simple Hack Could Tank Your Business 7 VPN services left data of millions of users exposed online Universities Brand ‘Drama Therapy’ And ‘Journalism’ as STEM Majors to Circumvent Immigration Policy DoJ suggested OANN should call FBI about NPR’s tipline, emails show Google reportedly peeks into Android data to gain edge over third-party apps Russia’s GRU hackers hit US government and energy targets Your next smartphone will be a lot harder to scratch --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Hey, welcome back,  everybody. Craig Peterson here on WGAN. It's our last half hour together today, but we'll be back again next week. One till three here on WGAN every Saturday. Of course, I'm on with Matt Gagnon during drive times on Wednesday morning at seven 34, as we discuss the latest in technology news. You've probably been in the hearing warnings. I've certainly been talking about them with Matt, about all of the nastiness that's going on right now with the hackers. And we're talking about soup to nuts hackers here. We're talking about nation States. In other words, countries like Russia and Iran and particularly China and all of the things they're trying to do to really mess us up. It's a shame to see that, but we [00:01:00] also have just regular old hackers. Those people typically in Eastern Europe who are just hoping to get their hands on a hundred thousand dollars from some rich American who doesn't deserve the money, because then, wow, this is great. It's important to them in their family for years. In fact, their extended family for years. So they're doing everything they can to get money from us. The number of hack attempts has gone way up. I've seen numbers as high a, 300% through phishing attacks and various other attacks, including direct attacks on our firewalls, our websites on basically everything that is facing the internet. So it's a real problem out there and threat actors, these bad guys are trying to take advantage of people as part of this pandemic. They're pretending that they are the World Health [00:02:00] Organization, the Internal Revenue Service, the Centers for Disease Control or some government agency or NGO, as they say, non-governmental organizations. There have been a lot of them coming out pretending to be from the United Kingdom's government, the government of Canada and the government of France. That is a very big deal because they're being successful at. Unsurprisingly, the COVID-19 phishing campaigns have just taken off. I'm looking at a chart right now, different page deployments. So it hit a peak around March 26th and it's been dropping. But here's what these pages are that I'm talking about. These are pages up on the dark web, just regular webpage type pages, and bad guys. These bad [00:03:00] actors go there and they can download templates. Templates of emails, templates of the website. So instead of taking a day or two to come up with a great copy of a website that looks just like the World Health Organization, all they have to do is pay 10 bucks, $10. For a set of templates that they can now use to send out to you, and me, emails that look like the World Health Organization.  If we click on it, take us to a website that looks like a World Health Organization or one that makes it look like your computer was infected. A lot of these templates have multiple pages, as well as emails, malicious web domains that can be inserted. The bad guys can rent a web domain and use that. This is regular marketing. [00:04:00] Where you might have an affiliate and you use an affiliate code in order to, track that was my lead I want to get paid if they buy.  Well, they have affiliate codes for these bad websites. It's absolutely amazing. Then these credential phishing attackers have our information that they've taken from some hack online. There are some huge databases of our email addresses, usernames names, and passwords that are out of their huge databases. They're using these databases here to try and get you to click on something. Because they know the last four of your social security number, they know your email address, they know your name. In many cases, they might even know your bank because what they'll do is use the information that they've stolen from, whatever it is, [00:05:00] a clothing website and use that same email address and that same password to try and log into a number of bank websites. Are you using the same email address and password to using multiple sites? No, you're not, are you? Because that's what they're doing. That's called credential stuffing and credential fishing. We've seen these landing page deployments go down a little bit, which makes sense because again, most of the bad guys have been doing it. So let's talk about some of these spoofed websites. What do they look like? the domain is usually a giveaway, if you're paying attention. So for instance, they might have a wastewater treatment.co. Dot N Z. So that's particular site is a World Health Organization, branded [00:06:00] credential fishing template. So you go to that page, you verify quote, unquote, your email, and your password. And now you're in. Now we know that there was supposedly a hack of the World Health Organization's credentials. A hard to tell if that's absolutely true or not, but they're copying the WHO's logo, color scheme and they're trying to get you to enter in your credential. Same thing with the United States Center for Disease Control and looking at a spoof site right now. It's cdc.gov dot Coronavirus dot secure dot server dot shorter-term rental.org. Obviously it's not really shorter-term rental. So people look at it okay. cdc.gov coronavirus. Okay. That makes sense. It says authenticate with your email provider to generate a vaccine ID. It has quick login links for outlook, g-mail, office, [00:07:00] EA, AOL, and Yahoo.  It's asking for an email address and a password. So you can receive a vaccine ID, whatever the heck that is. This is a broad web email credential phishing template. Here's another one here. This is a see matters dot com.  Of course, it's coronavirus is what they're trying to get at here. Financial aid, details. It says, after an accounting audit of our records, we discovered that you are eligible for an instant amount of $1079.83 cents worth of financial aid. Upon submission, your request will be further reviewed by our accounting team. And the amount in question will be credited to your confirmed financial institution in a timeframe of 48 hours. Again, fake. Here's another one. This is a get my payment website that's out there. And again, these are all templates that they pay their 10 bucks and they [00:08:00] get a set of templates. It makes it look like it's the IRS, but again, it's not. They are, IRS is URL, and if you check the SSL key signature that's not them either. So this one is to get my payment. It asks for your social security number, your date of birth, your full name and your zip or postal code. Okay. All right there and the IRS site, how's that for fun? if you want the real IRS site, by the way, go to irs.gov and you can click through on there. Here's another one. Get my payment, the government of Canada it's even in French as well. Emergency Canada, emergency response benefit. These things just go on and on, Canada revenue L'Agence du Revenu du Canada de Aussi en Francais. The United Kingdom, her Majesty's revenue and customs, it goes on and on. So the bottom line here be very careful. The bad guys are out there. [00:09:00] They've got these ready-made COVID-19 themed websites that they're stealing. They're renting, they're putting online and they have really been making a lot of money. All right. When we get back, we're going to talk about Britain's hard lesson about blind trust in so-called scientific data. You're listening to Craig Peterson here on WGAN an online Craig peterson.com. Stick around. We'll be right back. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Craig discusses the truth about the hyped-up statistics that the entire pandemic was based on. The epidemiological methods of Neil Ferguson from Imperial College were questionable from the get-go.  For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: How to find Stalkerware on your smartphone This Simple Hack Could Tank Your Business 7 VPN services left data of millions of users exposed online Universities Brand ‘Drama Therapy’ And ‘Journalism’ as STEM Majors to Circumvent Immigration Policy DoJ suggested OANN should call FBI about NPR’s tipline, emails show Google reportedly peeks into Android data to gain edge over third-party apps Russia’s GRU hackers hit US government and energy targets Your next smartphone will be a lot harder to scratch --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: 00:00:00] Hey everybody. Welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN. I am going to talk about something that's going to upset a few people know I'm sure. I can hear. Now, there was a great article this week from the city journal. City journal.org is where you'll find it online. CJ's what they call themselves. They've got a lot of interesting stuff really about London, about the UK, but here also in the US. They've got the eye-on news, the politics of fear, talking about economists and what's happening here. It just goes on and on. They've got a lot of very cool stuff. A bunch of things, Manhattan Institute as well. In this particular case, they're talking about Britain's hard lesson about blind trust in [00:01:00] scientific authorities. It was Chris von Csefalvay who wrote this article and I have it up on my website, as well as you'll find it at the city journal. This article goes on for quite a while. it goes into a lot of background on this noted epidemiologist by the name of Neil Ferguson. Neil Ferguson and all of these other epidemiologists from around the world actually met last October and they did some pandemic planning. What do they need to be concerned about? What might happen if there was some sort of a pandemic and what does it all mean? They went through a whole bunch of stuff. It's called event 201. You can look it up online and it's pandemic tabletop exercise. They looked at a bunch of different scenarios [00:02:00] based on pandemics that might occur. So you get these guys like Neil Ferguson who go to these planning practices if you will like the event two Oh one and they get up and bloviate and they talk about it. How we've seen this before the H1N1, Swine flu, SARS, MERS, Ebola, and here's what's happened in the past. They try and say while this was happening in the past. It's probably gonna come out along the same lines in the future. No, I'm simplifying this. I get it. Okay. But that's the basics of what they do. So they all sit around and they talk about, what might happen? How might it be different? How could we have done something better in the past? I'm glad they do these things. But part of the problem that comes from these, is you get people who are all of a sudden [00:03:00] elevated and they're elevated without peer review. Now peer review, I think, is something that's really important. I'm not talking about P I E R. This is nothing to do without in, in the ocean, on the docs or the piers. Peer review, according to Wikipedia is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work. It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. So in other words, peer review is where you have multiple people who understand the field. In this case, the epidemiology, and can review the work that was done and then say, yes, this is valid. Now, many people said, "Oh no, this is coming on so fast. We just can't peer review. we have to go. [00:04:00] We have to do we have to go. We have to do", and I can understand that right upfront. We didn't really know. all we really knew was China was lying to us. We've known that for a long time. Although that seems to be news to CNN and various other organizations like the World Health Organization is controlled by China. But when that's about the only thing we knew, so we said, okay, let's try and protect everybody. Everybody stays home. Of course, totally crashed the economy worldwide. the very bad, very high impact here. Now Neil Ferguson came up with this report. He called it to report nine and it was titled the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions to reduce COVID-19 mortality in healthcare demand. He used some computational models that he had put together 13 years ago that had not [00:05:00] been, you guessed it, peer-reviewed. We'll tell you a little bit more about his code here in a few minutes, but he used these computational models that he had put together to predict that absent social distancing and other mitigation measures Britain would suffer a half a million deaths from the Coronavirus and the US would suffer 2.2 million deaths.  He also said that even with mitigation measures in place, the epidemic would still likely result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and health systems most notably intensive care units being overwhelmed many times over, so that freaked out parliament in the UK, freaked out prime minister, Boris Johnson. He ended up imposing a national quarantine. Of course, the US did the same. We stopped flights from China, except for US citizens who could be repatriated. Same [00:06:00] thing's true with those holding green cards, you could come back into the US as well.  At the time everything looked to be pretty solid, and now we're hearing things a lot different. So here's the bottom line. You're the UK scientific advisory group for emergencies. This is the guys that were tasked with handling the coronavirus crisis said that the model was implemented in thousands of lines of undocumented code written in C. Which is a language you never write this kind of code in. It's what I spent decades writing kernel-level code in. Okay. It is not for researchers. C is for professional programmers. They also said that he refused to publish the original source code. The Imperial college has refused freedom of information act [00:07:00] requesting the original source code. The Imperial college says the public interest is not sufficiently compelling. Yeah. Yeah. We only crashed the whole world economy. Ferguson himself even admits that the code was written 13 years ago to model an influenza pandemic. So it raises a bunch of questions here, other than Ferguson's reputation. What did the UK government have in front of them to assess the model and the implementation? They certainly didn't have peer review. How did they validate the model? What safeguards were implemented to ensure it was correctly applied? This code is a parent, a tangled mess of undocumented steps with no discernible overall structure. That's according to people that have seen it, even experienced developers would have to make a serious effort [00:08:00] to understand it. It would not pass a cursory review by a Ph.D. committee in computational epidemiology. In other words, It's a total farce. This article is written by the way, by a virologist, and part of what he does every day is modeling complex processes. So his opinion, which is what I just read to you here, has some weight behind it, frankly. So apparently the Imperial college and Ferguson, just used what's called the incumbency effect. Wow. The imperial college has a good reputation and Ferguson has a decent reputation. Therefore, we're going to accept this one. In fact, they should never have accepted any of this stuff. Ferguson, Imperial college completely refused to examine any of the taxpayer-funded code. None of the [00:09:00] taxpayer-funded code. this is completely contrary to the UK, certainly to the United States who also followed along. This is what Dr. Fauci followed. These are the things he was saying at the same time Fauci was saying them. This is just incredible.  I really like here how the Manhattan Institute for policy research calls Ferguson's arguments only a little better than the dog ate my homework. Oh, and by the way, Ferguson resigned from the Imperial College task force because he apparently had a tryst with a married woman and did not follow social distancing requirements in the UK and the social distance scene guidelines that he had published and presented to her Majesty's government. So there you [00:10:00] go. The whole thing, total farce, an absolute farce. Now obviously we have people dying and that's never good, but we have it every year. What has really put the icing on the cake? For me personally, they started saying, "Hey, don't pay attention to the comparisons of a normal flu season to Corona" because I didn't know this, these are my words. We've been lying about the number of flu deaths every year". Yes. Yes, indeed. They have these tens of thousands of flu deaths that they've been counting every year. Apparently a bad flu year is only about 1500 actual flu deaths. So now they're saying. ignore the flu deaths statistics. We've been publishing for a few decades because we've been lying to you, but we're not going to say that. Look at the COVID-19 deaths, which are [00:11:00] also not COVID-19 deaths. They have not been doing autopsies to check to see if they actually died of COVID-19.  There examples of this, including the one child under the age of 18 that had died in this one city. Turned out, yeah no. COVID-19, but it was reported as a COVID-19. I don't know if we'll ever figure this mess out. Anyhow, have a great week. Stay out of trouble. I'll be back next Saturday at 1:00 PM. I'll be on with Matt Gagnon on Wednesday morning at seven 34. Make sure you join every morning for the morning drive show and I will be back. As I said Saturday one to three. Also, visit me online. Craig peterson.com. Have a great week, guys. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Craig discusses some of the steps to take to relaunch your team after the pandemic. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: How to find Stalkerware on your smartphone This Simple Hack Could Tank Your Business 7 VPN services left data of millions of users exposed online Universities Brand ‘Drama Therapy’ And ‘Journalism’ as STEM Majors to Circumvent Immigration Policy DoJ suggested OANN should call FBI about NPR’s tipline, emails show Google reportedly peeks into Android data to gain edge over third-party apps Russia’s GRU hackers hit US government and energy targets Your next smartphone will be a lot harder to scratch --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Hey everybody. Welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN and online, of course, Craig peterson.com. Do you have any questions? You can always email me, M E @craigpeterson.com. Always glad to help out. Plus if you get on my email list, you'll find out about what I'm doing this week, what the pros and cons of everything are. I will be sure to keep you up to date. We've got some very cool stuff coming up. We're making some, I think fantastic changes that are all for the better for you guys. Get more information out and doing it in a timely fashion. I mentioned before the break, your remote team, and I told you to brace yourselves here. There is a great article that was in the Harvard business review this last week. It's talking about relaunching your remote team. Many of us have remote teams [00:01:00] and the remote teams are good and they're bad. But in just a few short weeks meeting tools like Zoom, Microsoft teams, we've got WebEx teams, Google chat, Slack, they've gone from kind of a supplement where we might use them for remote workers. We might use them for the team to just keep some notes to each other. It's moved from that point to where it is really. The primary way of doing business internally. Those new tools to us, right? To many of us are really replacing the bubbler, the meetings, the emails, even frankly, or workspaces in our offices before. Sometimes we had open plans, which are now being pretty heavily frowned upon. Cubes, which a lot of places are going back to. So people have individual spaces or offices.  The latest studies are showing [00:02:00] having an office actually increases your productivity, pretty substantially. We've now gone to our bedrooms, the kids old bedroom before they moved out, home offices, kitchen tables. I'm on every week with Jim Polito. He is the morning drive host on two of the biggest stations in Massachusetts and Jim is running the show from his kitchen table, with his dog, occasionally barking there in the back background. I t has changed for everyone. I was at a webinar. Yeah, a three-day conference. It was held on the web, last weekend, and they're calling this the great reset and it's a term I've heard other people use as well, but the great reset means a whole different world when it comes to working from home. As we're trying to relaunch our teams re-orient based on the [00:03:00] new realities that are out there. So let's go through what Harvard has to say that we really need to be paying attention to. Number one, they say revisit your shared purpose when we have all of these team members and they're all different, a little, hopefully, they are and different people with different ways of thinking, bring different things to the business. It's all of these different interaction styles, like the MBTI styles that really help to make our organization strong. But now that we're all at home and many of us will continue to be at home. Do the team members understand what they're supposed to be doing? Clear and specific goals. Does everybody on a team understand what that team is supposed to be able to accomplish? What the goals are for the team. Because again, we pulled the [00:04:00] trigger so fast on this. Many of us just didn't get it all together we're relaunching. Management has to discuss how we can get these teams going here, let them know clearly what the business goals are. Let them know clearly what the strategy is because most businesses have changed because of the pandemic, small businesses like mine. When something like this happens, tend to go out of business. But they come back in a completely different way. some of the same people, the same owners, but now a much different angle than what they had before.  Big businesses. They can't pivot that quickly. They're struggling to try to figure out what they should do. They go for cost-cutting measures. That's usually the first thing that they end up doing. Does your team do your teams? No, what they should be doing and have the team members themselves express their perspective. It was here [00:05:00] on how the organization and the team's purpose might have changed. Second here, reassess your available resources. In the last segment, we talked about VPNs, the pros and cons of VPNs. What's really going on here while this relaunch here is the time to re-examine. In the resource column, that means what information or data do you have? What kind of budgets do have? What kind of equipment, software networks do you have? That's going to help the team advance their goals. No, I don't really have to have a detailed list. Everything that's necessary, but we need to reach a general consensus about what the team needs, what are the resources, and how do we access them?  Everybody needs to be on the same page about how the pandemic has affected the team's budget.  Also the partnerships. [00:06:00] Remember we all have vendors we buy from and we all have customers or clients that we work with and we're selling to. Do we understand how their organizations have changed because of the pandemic? We have to next understand our team members' constraints. Many of us are working from home with our family around for the very first time. Our kids are not in school and most school districts are not reopening until the fall of 2020. How do you deal with that? It was one thing when the kids stayed with grandma and grandpa during the summer, but we're talking about a lot of months now, does that make sense? Can we even handle that? So some of our team members may need a little bit of assistance here in figuring out how can they juggle their family responsibilities. New family responsibilities they haven't had before [00:07:00] with their new work responsibility and the need to be available at certain times. So in many cases, the answer to that from businesses is we're going to be flexible. We're going to allow flex hours who used to talk about mother's hours, but now the kids are home all day long. So we've got to help them with this manage deadline expectations, and also maybe rebalance some of the workloads between all of the people. Within the workgroups, we've got to reestablish norms. We're talking about how people conduct themselves in meetings, et cetera. it's really easy to be on something like Slack and make some snarky comment or in email or on a conference call that can really be hurtful. That can really cause disharmony within a team. So we've got to figure out what the next norms are. It's okay to wear pajama bottoms, but you gotta [00:08:00] be dressed professionally on top. Cause that's what the cameras going to get, if that's what you want, that's great. Do that. We should also be discussing how often team members should connect virtually during the week and what digital tools they should be using. Things like email can be great for delayed communication, but many people just drop everything into WebEx teams and expect other people to snap to whether it's WebEx teams or Slack or whatever it might be. Okay. So when you're choosing which tools are best for discussion, we need to be very sensitive to the fact that real-time video chatis not the same as face to face interaction. Because if you were to walk by their cubicle or their workspace, you'd see, they were busy and you're not going to interrupt them right there. They're in a flow or the, maybe they're in a meeting. Dropping in on him. I'm going to be very bad when now [00:09:00] you disrupted them because you've popped up a Zoom meeting in front of them. Zoom fatigue is real. So think about all of these tips and tricks and techniques. You'll find more about it. On my website@craigpeterson.com. Harvard business school had this article. It is great. If you're trying to manage some teams, make sure you read it. Craig peterson.com and I'm right here on WGAN. I'll be back also Wednesday morning at seven 34 with Matt. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Craig discusses VPNs, How they work, and Why they might not be protecting you as much as you think. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: How to find Stalkerware on your smartphone This Simple Hack Could Tank Your Business 7 VPN services left data of millions of users exposed online Universities Brand ‘Drama Therapy’ And ‘Journalism’ as STEM Majors to Circumvent Immigration Policy DoJ suggested OANN should call FBI about NPR’s tipline, emails show Google reportedly peeks into Android data to gain edge over third-party apps Russia’s GRU hackers hit US government and energy targets Your next smartphone will be a lot harder to scratch --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Hey everybody. Craig Peterson here on WGAN. Welcome. welcome. Hey, if you missed the first hour, I just want to remind you that you can catch it online. I podcast this whole show every week on your favorite podcasting application or website. Just look for me, Craig Peterson, or visit Craig Peterson dot com. Cause I have them all there as well. You did miss a lot that first hour because we talked about the new website attacks that are underway that are hurting you, me, as well as businesses that have just set up websites recently. It is a bad state of affairs. We talked about company identity-related breaches that are happening. The coming disruption to college. What Google Chrome is doing to stop some of these resource-draining ads. That are [00:01:00] actually rather, I wouldn't say the malicious, but they are stealing from you. They're using your computer to mine for Bitcoin for them. I suspect this is actually going to get a lot worse. Maybe that's why Google is finally taking action with the Chrome browser. The reason I think that this is really going to start taking off is that the Bitcoin value is about to be halved. What happens at that point, normally in the marketplace, if a stock's worth, let's say a hundred dollars and they halve it, it's worth $50. There's a lot of pressure for that stock value to increase back up to the pre-split amount, back up to the hundred dollars point. What the problem is when it comes to these cryptocurrencies is yes indeed they can go ahead and split it and say it's worth half of what it used to be worth. But now the people that are mining for the Bitcoins are in for a whole different world. And the different world is, Hey, I can [00:02:00] barely break even, right now, in fact, in most places like here in the Northeast, electricity is so expensive that it costs you more to mine for Bitcoin, and it cost you more than electricity than the Bitcoin is worth. So once they halve the value, now, all of a sudden it's just not worth mining anymore. So that's going to be an interesting result. Another really interesting analysis too, of Bitcoin this week and this kind of U-shaped factor that it has based on the key sizes and little too geeky to get into here. This is not a Bitcoin show. But it is a show about your security, what you can do and what you should do just this week, we installed some network equipment, a whole new set of network equipment for a lady named Sue down in mass and we were talking with Sue about it. We had preconfigured everything shipped it out, helped her with [00:03:00] it. She was having some problems trying to figure out. Okay. So what plugs into what I think next time, maybe we'll just make sure everything's all plugged in before we ship it out. But we had one our guys go by, he only lives about 20 minutes away from Sue. He went and five minutes later, everything was done. But while he was there installing this whole new network for Sue's company, there was an interesting conversation that ensued because Sue told him that I was anti-VPN. As well as a couple of other things that I was against, the truth is yeah, I'm anti these commercial VPN services that they keep trying to sell you. I read a summary this week from a respected place. They must have people writing articles now that don't know what they're doing. I've certainly seen that, people in third world countries, second world countries, that don't know what they're doing. But they're cheap to hire as a writer. So they hire them as [00:04:00] writers and off they go with their cheapness, not really understanding things. This article said," Hey, yeah, you should use a VPN because it's going to keep your data safe. It keeps it encrypted. It's great. great." I, of course. Just rolled my eyes and lost respect for them. VPNs have a use, but it's very limited use and that's what Sue had caught on when she attended one of my webinars talking about VPNs and how you can best use them. They are useful. They were invented in order to help businesses with their data and keep their data safe, connect offices together, et cetera. They are not great for just going to your bank website. In fact, you could be in more of a security problem if you use a VPN for your bank than if you don't use a VPN for your bank. So I'll just keep that all straight. I figured now's a good time to talk about this. There's a great article in [00:05:00] dark reading this week that I put up on my website as well. You can find it there. This article is talking about challenges that exist with VPNs, and this is really a big deal. A VPN can be a step in the right direction. If someone's trying to use a VPN, they're probably trying to do the right thing, but it's really not a be-all and end-all when it comes to security. Not only does it fall short in many ways, but as I've explained in my webinars, it takes a lot longer to explain than I have time for right now. If you want to catch a criminal, you go to where the criminals are. If you want to find people that are trying to keep their information secret or quiet, you go to where the VPN exit points are and that's exactly what's been happening. It isn't just the five eyes or the nine eyes or the 14 eyes it's organized crime. It's just all over the place. Be very careful. In March of 2020, all of a sudden [00:06:00] everything changed. Everything shifted. We saw a huge shift in people starting to work from home. Some businesses had to stay open. They didn't necessarily have to have the employees right there in the office. And according to them, Gartner survey, that just happened here with chief financial officers. Gartner's reporting that 74% of organizations will move at least 5% of their previously onsite workforce to permanently remote positions following them pandemic. That is pretty good. Three-quarters of all businesses. Are going to move, give or take one 20th of their onsite workers to offsite. I was going to have a major impact on everything, on real estate and obviously the technology side too. But let's talk a little bit about VPNs right now and what are they good for? What are they not good for? So point number one. VPNs now, [00:07:00] remember I said they're great for businesses, point to point, they replaced the leased lines. That's what they were invented for initially. But typical traditional VPNs have a device that's at the business office. That piece, that device, that piece of hardware can usually only handle a certain number of users. That's also true with the data line that's coming into your office. If you don't have enough bandwidth to support all of these things. People accessing their desktops, or in some cases I know businesses that have a database running at the main office. Then there are clients, there's software on people's remote workstations that make hundreds of not thousands of requests against this database. That's not the best way to do it by the way. If you're interested, maybe we can talk about that sometime. I'll put something up in one of the webinars. Here's the problem with that? [00:08:00] The VPN and the data lines can only handle just so much data. Many businesses came up with the specs for their VPN appliances. Pre- COVID-19, Pre pandemic. How many people were actually fully using it? Then, for instance, we have a client an auto dealer, and the only time they used the VPN was when the comptroller was out of training or something, it might happen during the weekend. One of the supervisors would have to hop on. That's a lot different than once a pandemic starts. Now there are all of a sudden focused on their websites and their online sales and everything else that's going on. So it's a huge difference. So that surge and teleworking that occurred really made these VPNs fail. Companies struggling to figure out how to scale to support so many users. So that's part of what had been helping businesses with. There's a lot of creative approaches [00:09:00] going on, such as limiting VPN use to certain workers. There have been businesses that have been taking the shifts and moving them around. So there's a shift that starts at eight. I need another one that starts at 10 and another one that starts at noon so that there are fewer people on the VPN. Maybe they're only on the VPN for a certain number of hours, but frankly, those are not long term viable strategies. VPNs are also failing to balance productivity and security. Because let me tell you productivity and security have been at loggerheads with each other for a very long time and VPNs don't fix this problem. In fact, they make it worse. Because now not only are you overloading the VPN, all of the gateways and the firewalls are slowing down everybody's productivity. These home users on their home networks with home computers that are [00:10:00] infected are now connecting to the network and that infection's getting transferred. Unfortunately, that transfer is to the main office. Hey, a VPN ain't gonna help with that. Mobile devices. VPNs are encrypted and the encryption that they use is very complex and it causes problems on our devices. Our mobile devices were not made to handle that. They have to continually update their keys, they're sharing the public keys and their session key. They just can't handle it. Frankly, VPNs are not built for the modern workforce. There are so many ways this really should be done and unfortunately is not being done. VPNs. They are not a panacea. When we come back, let's talk about our remote teams. We've had months. Time to relaunch. [00:11:00] You're listening to Craig Peterson right here on WGAN and online@craigpeterson.com. Stick around. I'll be right back. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Good morning everybody! I was on with Matt this morning and we had a very good discussion Big Tech Censorship of speech and although it was bit off-script from what I planned to talk about it was an interesting subject. Let's get into my conversation with Matt on WGAN. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Craig Peterson: We now have kind of a shadow bureaucracy, if you will. That is in place by the programmers who might be the ones that are really causing many of these problems. We know they are when it comes to Google and the search results not showing results for certain websites like Breitbart. Craig Peterson: Hey everybody, Craig Peterson here. Welcome. So glad to have you here. it was a really a fun flashback for me because it reminded me of my years and years of doing kernel programming. I want to know if you have a solution for this. Anyways, here we go with Matt, WGAN morning news. Matt Gagnon: Seven 36 on the WGAN morning news on Wednesday morning. And it's time to talk to Greg Peterson, our tech guru, Craig, how are you this morning? [00:01:00] Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning. Doing great, Matt. Fantastic. We always talk to Craig at this time every week and pleased to have him here. Once again, Craig, we've got a lot of topics to get to, you know that you and I discussed of course before you come on every week, but I must go off-script. If you don't mind, Craig, come with me down this garden path. Okay. So you saw, I trust the whole thing in front of the Supreme court with the doctors yesterday and then all the brouhaha afterward. Okay. So I'm going to set aside any sort of conversation between you and me about whether or not you should take those doctors seriously, whether or not they're cranks or whether or not they're truth sayers, all that stuff. Set it aside for me for a moment, let's deal with what the tech companies did though. Because that video was shared, it was a press conference essentially. And it was shared on Facebook. It's on YouTube. It's everywhere. It was taken down everywhere. Tell me a little bit about, I don't know, just your thoughts on exactly where we are as it relates to these tech giants, trying to police truth like that and take down stuff. [00:02:00] And whether or not even it's effective. I gotta be honest with you, Craig. I feel like them doing that, even if they're right and these people are cranks. Which again, we're not debating right now, even if they are right. It just increases the interest and the, Hey, what are they hiding stuff about this? It makes it more popular. I just don't get what they're doing here. Yeah. I have to agree with you on that. And it's interesting because I saw the video I saw part of it live when they were doing it. The doctors, because my wife had pointed it out to me, and I had a look at it and I thought, wow, this is really interesting, but they're getting into a lot of detailed stuff and I got the other stuff to do. I stopped watching it. I figured all this go back to it later. It is. It's really an interesting problem here because I think what's happening. Are these tech giants have the typical hard left-wing mentality of we're smarter than you. Just like Hillary Clinton's the smartest woman that has ever lived and she has to be president so she can tell us what to do. [00:03:00] That is exactly what these tech giants are doing. No, obviously not everybody had that attitude, but there were plenty that did with Hillary. But when we're talking about these tech companies, they're treating us like they are our parents and we're three-year-olds. That we can evaluate things. I think it's a real problem. I'm concerned for a couple of reasons, obviously about the information so many people rely on it, et cetera, but what's the recourse here. What's going to happen. Are the feds are going to swoop in? You remember a couple of years ago there was talk about, we need to regulate these companies. Is that going to make it even worse? It's going to depend on what the bureaucrats have to say. So it's very upsetting to me.  I've moved, for instance, I moved over to Parler. Matt Gagnon: Instead of Twitter? Craig Peterson:  Exactly many people have, but I don't know. There are some alternatives, Parler being one of them for Twitter, but it's, [00:04:00] Matt Gagnon: But let's be honest though, Craig, Parler is great and everything, but it doesn't have the same volume of people and I don't think it ever will. It's basically made up of conservative, homeless people who are just, they're homeless online at least. They're tired of being beaten around by Twitter, but that's not enough to really make up a broad base of users. What matters is what most Americans use. If they're using the stuff and their content is curtailed like that, it's just interesting. Craig Peterson: It is. It is, but it's the same problem, right? This is what you're pointing out. So you've got this one voice and if you disagree with that voice, Your tweet gets deleted or your account gets deleted as we've been seeing with the whole QAnon thing. You talked about that before. It's very upsetting to me and I cannot see a good answer to any of this. Matt Gagnon: Nor can I, Craig, and that's a sad tale. It's just, it's increasingly happening. I saw also another story that showed that Google was no longer producing search results for Breitbart too, which is, stuff like this is very, it's terrifying to me. [00:05:00] I'm actually going to talk about this issue a little bit more in-depth, a little bit later on. And one of the things I'm going to be talking about is a number of scientists over the years that were dismissed and not taken seriously in their time. And then years after their deaths, they'd be, they became the scientific consensus on something. They were ahead of their time and blankly dismissed by the people who were their contemporaries. And not that I'm suggesting that you blow in front of the Supreme court where those people, because frankly, I don't think that's true. I think they in many ways have very problematic things about their paths, but regardless the point is when you make yourself the arbiter of truth like that. And you're the one that's deeming what is, and is not worthy of being heard in a public dialogue. It becomes a terrifying thing for, in my opinion, in this country. And it's attitudes about free speech and its attitudes about mature dialogue between people and everything else. I don't know if a Republican truly stand with this kind of stuff happening wholesale across the country. Craig Peterson: Yeah, it can. we all know the world is flat and the earth is the center of the universe, et cetera. [00:06:00] Matt Gagnon: that's my point though, Craig, exactly. I know you're hitting on it, but yeah. if Twitter existed back then in Google existed back then somebody was saying that the earth was round. When everybody thought the earth was flat, Google would remove all websites that pointed the things that say that the earth is round and because it's not part of the currently held scientific consensus on something and therefore is not worthy of being heard. When I don't know, at least my attitude is you should be able to hear the argument, even if it's crockery. And if it means some people buy into something that's wrong, that's just the price you pay for freedom. In my opinion, it's just what it is. Craig Peterson: Yeah. There you're absolutely right. And there are alternatives, but there doesn't seem to be a downside for these tech companies really. Matt Gagnon: Yeah. [00:07:00] Craig Peterson: You've got so many of these amps advertisers telling Facebook, or we're stopping our advertisements and that is a punishment for Facebook. And although they've held true to some degree about not doing as much censorship as they had been doing, they have started a little bit more censorship, it's getting worse and worse. And that this problem is much more difficult than it ever has been before for one other reason. And that is the program are involved. I've written a lot of code over the years, programming that I did decades ago helped to build and establish the internet. Some of it's still in use today. And is on our phones and is on our computers. When you're sitting there and you're working on a program, you have to make certain assumptions. So you try and cover all of the paths, all the things that could go wrong. But when we're talking about a company like Google or Facebook or Twitter, that really does. Edit it audit your feeds, right? You follow someone. You're not going to see everything that they post. [00:08:00] In fact, in most cases, you might only see five to 10% of the things that they're posting online, even though you followed them. So we now have kind of a shadow bureaucracy, if you will. That is in place by the programmers, who might be the ones that are really causing many of these problems. We know they are. When it comes to Google and the search results and not showing results for certain ones, like Breitbart. Matt Gagnon: Yeah. Craig Peterson: How do you deal with that? Some guys sitting there eating pizza at 2:00 AM, writing some code that he may or may not have malicious intent that is going to block conservative or free speech. Matt Gagnon: There's gonna be a lot of dystopian novels written about this stuff. I think coming up in certain years, coming up soon, I really do think that it's just, a Brave New World is immediately at the top of my head for all this stuff. Craig, I appreciate you going a little off-script here and tossing this around with me here this morning. Cause I think it's an incredibly important topic and needs to be treated with seriousness. And a lot of people are not doing that right now. So thank you for helping me out a little bit on that. [00:09:00] Craig Peterson: Indeed. Hey, thanks. And by the way, this weekend, I'm really going to get into this VPN thing. I've warned people before. This is an, I told you. My gosh, if you're using free or cheap VPNs, make sure you tune on Saturday at one, because, they've been lying to you. These VPN companies and we'll get into in some detail. Matt Gagnon: Great. Thanks a lot, Craig. Appreciate it. As always coming up next. We'll talk a little bit about the ranked-choice voting challenge that I was speaking with Nick about a moment. Craig Peterson: Hey, does this summer seem to be going incredibly fast for you? I don't know. Many of us, myself included are still in a lockdown mode, but oh my gosh. All right, everybody. Hey, we'll be back on Saturday. We've been busy last night. I had our, our guy in, JJ who's helping me with the studio. Some of the videos & stuff that we're going to be doing is we're going to produce more training for everybody. And it's really, so I'll get the studio reorganized a little bit. The lighting's better camera position has a better, I fixed color problems that were there on the cameras. And we got a lot coming up. We're going to teach you, as I mentioned [00:10:00] here about VPNs, but I'm also going to do some live webinar. Stuff with you guys. And not only about VPNs, but about a whole host of things. Our firewalls, what we're doing at home, the prosumer equipment versus just the consumer equipment, and how you just cannot use consumer equipment anymore. So it's going to be a fun time, a lot of work for me, but that's fine. I got to get this info out and hopefully, a few of you guys are interested in hiring me and my family business here. That's been doing cybersecurity for 20 years. so we've got a couple of my kids in it and as well as a few other people, but, hopefully, if you are interested in hiring us to help you out. Anyways lots of free stuff, lots of great stuff. Keep your eyes out and make sure you're subscribed. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye. ---  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Good morning, everybody. I was on with Jim Polito this morning and we talked about the possibility that I got a COVID infection.  Then we spoke about what Cell Carriers have done after urging from the FCC and FTC about Spam Calls and Texts. Then I shared an I Told You So... moment with Jim.  Here we go with Jim. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com ---  Automated Machine Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Craig Peterson: He did, is he came out and said, okay, cell carriers and phone carriers, you got to do something about that. Cause this is just absolutely nuts. Yes. It looks like I might have had the COVID. Craig Peterson here. we talked about a few different things and make sure you stay to the end because, If you're using VPNs, particularly the free or low-cost VPNs, we got some real bad news for you. So stick around, because here we go. Jim Polito: Everybody's tech talk guru and our good friend, Craig Peterson. Good morning, Craig. Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning, Jim. [00:01:00] Hey, I just saw that they released new symptoms for COVID-19. So this is real. It just goes on and on and on, all these symptoms, but, based on those new releases. I think I had the dreaded COVID, the Wuhan  Virus. Jim Polito: Really. Whoh, Whoh we had important stuff to talk about, like President Trump and his campaign may be being censored by cell carriers. But hold on and other stuff about VPNs, but wait a minute. what makes you think that Craig. Craig Peterson: Well, I had really bad chills. I was well under a heated blanket, I was really cold. My muscles ached like I was at the gym yesterday and had way overdone it. It was me versus "The Rock" and I won. And then the next day, all of my muscles felt like that. So I, anytime I would move, I would experience pain and I have never labeled anything as pain before. Jim Polito:  Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Craig Peterson: Yeah. [00:02:00] Jim Polito: You were fighting with the rock. Here's the real question. Did you smell what the rock was? Cooking? Because apparently another symptom is not being able to smell or taste. Craig Peterson: I could smell it. He was kind of sweaty when we were going at it. But,  I didn't have any loss of smell. So I was thinking, well, it isn't COVID, but I don't know what it is. It's just nasty. It's dragged on for about three, four weeks. You know, the cold thing when I had the real bad chills was only a couple of days.  Muscle soreness and a couple of other symptoms are new symptoms apparently of COVID-19. Jim Polito: Are you going to get, are you going to get tested, or are you going to check it out? What are you going to do? Craig Peterson: Well, that's the question, right? I'm past it. I'm pretty much asymptomatic now. So that means I'm not contagious according to the CDC, and the dreaded WHO. So what purpose is there in getting tested, right? [00:03:00] It's yeah, kind of like taking the flu shot, you know, or am I going to take a flu shot? Am I going to take a WuHan flu shot as well? Yeah, I don't know, but it smells a lot like it based on what I read, yesterday and these new symptoms I definitely had it. It is interesting. Right. I was able to survive and work the whole time. I was just a normal flu type. I was down for a couple of days, a few days. and that was it. And I am in the risk group kind of, you know, Jim Polito: Yeah. We're getting up there where we're crossing over into the risk group. We were with some good friends on Sunday and both their son and daughter well wait a minute, their son got it while he was away at school, tested positive for it and you know, it was fine. Then the daughter though had the high fever, the, you know, all this other stuff. And, and it was a big fever, the chills and all that. Didn't,  test positive for it.  I mean, she had the fever for three or four days, but nope, nothing. So you know what Craig. I just don't know.  I'm concerned about the way that news is being reported now. But that's a good transition into this. [00:04:00] So I liked the fact that on my smartphone, I got a call yesterday that said potential spam. And, I didn't pick it up. When it does that, I don't pick it up. Plus when I get a call from a number I don't recognize I don't pick it up, anyway. But there's a chance that Donald Trump's campaign efforts are being labeled as spam by the cell carriers. Could you explain that to me? Craig Peterson: Yeah, this is kind of an interesting development because we have had this problem with spam calls and spam text messages for a long time. And the FCC working with the FTC, have been trying to figure out. What can we do an edge? Ajit Pai has been, has been really into all of this? Over at the federal communications commission. What he did is he came out and said, okay, cell carriers and phone carriers, you gotta do something about this. [00:05:00] Cause this is just absolutely nuts. We've got to stop all of these spam calls and spam texts. What the cell carriers did is they've come up with a new protocol that goes between their switches. It gets kind of technical. So the idea is if someone's making a lot of calls from the same source or sending a lot of text messages from the same source, then it gets flagged and potentially blocked. So you probably already noticed the number of these spam calls and the number of the spam text has gone down over the last few weeks. And there've been a few companies that have been very active in this T-Mobile and Sprint are kind of one that's in the lead right now. Last week, President Trump tried to send a text out to supporters and it makes the news because it was apparently blocked. [00:06:00] Now we're looking at this technology and kind of wondering, right. This is a question that popped in my head. I'm just looking at all of this, reading all these articles. What is that? The reason why, because. At a certain point, a human looks at all of these algorithms and the output of these programs and said, Oh yeah, well, this is obviously wrong. And we've seen that happen every time. Right? Fake news, you were just talking about with Facebook so that might've been president Trump's campaign. Jim Polito: We're talking with Craig Peterson our Tech Talk Guru, a great guy. See that's the kind of stuff that bothers me. Okay. Look, I know that Facebook is a liberal organization. I know it is. I know that something else within companies, you have, people who are not afraid to push their ideology on the company. [00:07:00] For example, the Cato Institute, which is a kind of a sometimes I say left-leaning, but they are more libertarian organization did a study and they found out that 77% of conservatives are self censor themselves because they're concerned that if they talk about the politics, they might lose their job. On the other side, extreme liberals as defined by this Cato study. I think it was about 54% of them take an activist standpoint, they purposefully share their political views. They don't self sensor and they actually act more like an evangelical about their own liberal views. And, you know, within a company, when you get an argument between two people or people making a decision, it seems to me that people are people and they're going to react like they do in this study. [00:08:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah. Yeah. It's inevitable. Even the programmers are, have those biases. And so when they program this stuff to try and, and stop these spam calls and spam messages. Yeah. That's messages, their biases are actually going to be reflected in the code they write. Jim Polito: It's just like the media. It's the same thing, Craig. That's that's bothersome. what about it? Cause I don't wanna, I don't wanna run out of time. What about VPNs? You really have an, I told you so moment here. Craig Peterson: Oh man. Yeah, we are almost out of time. So I'll make this really quick here. If you've attended any of the training that I've done, I do this free training that they run from about 10 minutes to an hour. I did training in February and March and April of this year and we covered VPNs.  I warned everybody about the problems with VPNs, particularly these commercial VPNs, and even more particularly the free VPNs. The idea behind VPN is it keeps your data safe. The reality is, well, yeah, not really. [00:09:00] So we've got these VPNs in a mentor report that just came out and they specifically named seven different VPN services. All of these services said "We do not log you, keep your information private. We keep it safe." Well, it turns out that they left 1.2 terabytes of private user data exposed online, these seven free VPN services. Now this personal data, Jim, you're going to love this. Not only the user's email, their home addresses passwords in plain text. In other words, there don't bother decrypting them because they're not even encrypted IP addresses and the worst part of this story. Is that in this 1.2 terabytes of data, you might ask, wow, that's a lot of data for just names and email addresses. [00:10:00] Oh no, no, no, no. All of these, no-log VPNs had been logging everyone's activity and it's now it's been exposed in the online world. So yet another reason not to use the VPNs. I'm going to do that training again. So, you know, keep an eye on your email. I've got to do this. I got to explain this. What to do and how to do it. Cause it's free VPN purposes. Jim Polito: You're the product. How, how can folks get more information? Craig Peterson: Well, get on that email list. So you find out about it, just go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Or you can just email me M E at Craig Peterson dot com and we'll let you know. These are free training. I'm not trying to push anything down your throat. Okay, but it's important stuff. Jim Polito: Well, we know that. Craig Peterson doesn't try to do that to you. Okay, Craig, excellent segment. We look forward to talking with you next week, sir. Craig Peterson: Hey take care. Jim Polito:  You take care of yourself too. I hope you remain healthy, sir. Take care. Craig Peterson: Bye-bye. [00:11:00] Bye-bye. Alright. When we return a final word, you're listening to the Jim Pollito show from my kitchen with pops. This is your safe space. ---  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome, Good Monday morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Jack Heath this morning discussing what we learned about VPNs.  BTW, if you have been listening to me for a while I have been telling you this -- but now there is Proof in Black and White that I what shared with you is TRUE! Here we go with Jack. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com ---  Automated Machine Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Craig Peterson: So these VPN services said they did not keep logs of what you were doing online. They were not tracking you. Guess what was in this data that was found online? Hey, good morning everybody. Craig Peterson here. I can't believe summer's almost half over. Well, that's what. It happens, right? Anyhow, I was on with Jack this morning and they had the most major I told you so, and I hate to say this, but if you're using VPNs, man, listen in because a huge, huge problem came out just last week. Jack Heath: Craig Peterson, a tech talk guy joins us his show air Saturdays. Here are these iHeart stations on the tech talk side, Craig. Good morning. One of these stories. Locally is more people falling victim to scams? What else do you have for us? [00:01:00] Craig Peterson: Oh man. I'm afraid. I have an I told you so, here this morning about VPN's. People have been using virtual private networks and the FBI came out with a warning a few weeks ago. Well, now we have discovered a group of seven of these free VPN apps that left all of their data exposed online. 1.2 terabytes of your personal data. So if you're using one of these free VPN services, which I warn against all of the time, in fact using a VPN service is usually worse than not using a VPN service. It turns out. Not just their email, their home addresses passwords in plain text, IP addresses, but all of these VPN services said they did not keep logs of what you were doing online. [00:02:00]They were not tracking. You get within this data that was found online. Every place you visited, where you went, your passwords, the whole nine yards. You cannot trust them. These VPN services, particularly the free VPN services. It's not going to make you safer. Jack Heath: Well, good, a good lesson learned. What about, um, the scam seemed to be going up as people do more virtual stuff. I'm not surprised people are going to try and take advantage of a bad situation. Is it ending? I mean, the basics don't open something. If you don't recognize it. Don't don't don't don't if a spam call comes through don't call and say, you know, here's my credit information, but is there anything new we should be doing to avoid these any good blockers or anything? Good. You know the way to kind of knock out the crap coming through, or is it just something that they're always going to get through? Craig Peterson: Well, we've got some really good news because of what's been happening over at the FCC and the FTC, actually. And that is that most now of the major cell phone carriers are able to block text messages. [00:03:00] If they look like they are a scam. So for instance, You guys I know are familiar with what happened with President Trump's text here that over the last week. Okay. And that is that his texts, he was sending out to his supporters were blocked. Now that's part of this automatic system, where if it looks like it might be a scam, it might be a spam-sending it out to thousands or millions of people it will be blocked. So yeah. Good news on that front T-Mobile has really taken a forward front position on this, which also now includes Sprint, but they're all kind of doing this and that is you are not going to be getting these text messages at the volume your before that are scams when you click on them or respond to them, or heaven forbid you callback a number that you don't recognize where they will be billing you $10-$20 for that phone call that number you didn't recognize. Those are all on a down surge right now. Jack Heath: All right, Craig Peterson. [00:04:00] Thank you very much. Craig Peterson.com. Make it a good Monday. Enjoy the heat. Craig Peterson: Take care. Jack Heath: All right. Hey, Craig Peterson: Were you, one of the people that went to my, one of my trips I did on VPNs, I did a bunch in February this year, not just VPNs, but general pieces of training. I'm going to do a lot more of them coming up. Probably back to school time in early September, but before then I'm going to be doing a bunch of smaller things and kind of getting my ducks in a row, working on some courses and stuff that we're going to be doing. We've also got some really great hardware done for you packs we're working on, but anyways. Those pieces of training that I did in February, I told you so, right. Right? How many of you guys dropped your VPN and services because I told you exactly what was going on? Now we have. Proof. Right. This has nothing to do with the general security problems businesses are [00:05:00] having because of VPNs and the misuse of VPN's. Anyway, I'm going to have to do that one again, obviously updated, but, O M G this is a very, very big deal. Take care, everybody. We'll be back tomorrow. Bye-bye. ---  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Message Input: Message #techtalk Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Good morning everybody! I was on with Matt this morning and we had a good discussion about Twitter's technology and what they are doing with banning and censoring people and organizations and what we learned since last week about the Twitter hack.  Also, the FBI is warning us about being sure who you are booking with when it comes to travel.  The bad guys are trying to trick you so be careful. and cyberthreats   Let's get into my conversation with Matt on WGAN. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Matt Gagnon: About the time we talked to Craig Peterson every week. Yes it is. And he's with us right now, Craig, how are you this morning? Hey, good morning. Doing pretty good. Pleaure to have you as always. So our tech guru needs to lead things off here by talking about Twitter. So I was just doing that with the whole Q Anon thing. And I suppose you can weigh in on that if you want to. But the other thing that's really big with Twitter here that we need to chat about. Is this Twitter breach, which exposed, its own employees. I think, you know, this whole Barack Obama and Elon Musk and all those other, prominent accounts were, were hacked. And it really was because of the back end employees. Was it not. Craig Peterson: Yeah, this is kind of a niche that's teen trick. It looks right now with the police investigations. Of course, the FBI is involved with this, that it was some kids that did this and they were able to get some inside people inside of Twitter here, contractors or [00:01:00] employees. To use Twitter's, what I call "God-mode," to take control of various accounts. And including, as you mentioned, a few, you've probably heard of like this Joe Biden guy, Kanye West Jeff Bezos, and many others. And what they were trying to do is persuade people to send them Bitcoin. So Joe Biden, for instance, on the Joe Biden accounts was saying, Hey, if you send me Bitcoin, this is a chance for me to give back. And for the next 30 minutes, if you send me Bitcoin, I'll double it. So if you send me a thousand dollars in Bitcoin, I'll send you $2,000 back. And there's postings out on Twitter of pictures, of this ,what I'm calling God-mode, with Beyonce's account and a few other people's accounts. So it looks like it was probably a social engineering attack. It was probably conducted by just [00:02:00] some kids and they were able to get some employees inside to give them access to absolutely everything. Matt Gagnon: We're talking with Craig Peterson. He is our tech guru and he joins us now to talk about the world of technology. Do you have any, I just mentioned it a moment ago, but I'm sure you're, you're a little bit up on this whole Q Anon thing. I mean, it seems to be a part of a, now a much more forceful and aggressive Twitter in terms of policing the speech that's on its own platform, which. You know, by the way, a, if that was going to be what they do, where the heck was this stuff like six or eight years ago. But, B this, this is, this is going into some really squirrely territory, in my opinion. What do you think about this, Craig? Craig Peterson: Yeah, I agree with that. It Twitter, just the public square where people can stand there and say almost anything or is Twitter something that should be a little bit more regulated here where if [00:03:00] they're going to start to censor things, what are they going to censor, where's the line. We already know that the. Person who was responsible for basically censoring president Trump's tweet was an avid Trump hater. That was working for Twitter. It, this whole thing is really quite a bit of a problem right now. The Feds are looking into how should we be regulating Twitter? Are they as a phone company or can they be liable for the types of things that they say? Like, for instance say a newspaper, is because newspaper does edit what it is they're going to publish. And when you look at the Q Anon stuff, some of it is turned out to be right. Some of it's turned out to be wrong, but conspiracy theories and language that we just don't want to hear, frankly, should not be governed by this [00:04:00] private organization. And last you have the ability to Sue them for what would it you been being with Twitter, slander or libel, right? Is it the, really, the written word? The lot of questions that we just haven't really been able to answer yet. Matt Gagnon: We're speaking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over the world of technology. So turning our gears somewhere else, here, not that there are very many air travelers right now, but the FBI has issued a cyber security warning to air travelers that are actually going around the country right now. So what is that warning all about Craig? Craig Peterson: Yeah, this is kind of an interesting problem here because so many of us are booking online. We are going online and, and, as part of that, we're going to the website to see if, has our flight's been canceled. It is, is a flight leaving on time. Something we've done for many years now, frankly, but right now the FBI is trying to raise some [00:05:00] awareness about the creation of a number of websites that are faked to look like the real deal, not just websites for Boston, Logan, or whatever, major airports out there, but they're also faking the website of the major. Airlines now, typically it involves having the carrier or two that is misspelled because many of us misspelled words, we're tied beam in and the airlines, frankly, weren't smart enough to grab misspellings of their names, but they're saying this is a real threat for travelers. They have had a lot of reports from people coming in saying there are fake websites out there for airports and all over the whole aviation industry. So be very, very careful. These websites do feature whatever organization or businesses logo, their fonts or color schemes or writing style. But in fact, they're just fooling users into thinking the site's [00:06:00] authentic and safe to use. Matt Gagnon: And Craig, before I let you go, I do have to ask you about this resurgence of the emoTet spam Trojan thing. So that's kind of been dormant for a while. Kind of a, what, what is what's happening with it now? Yeah, this is Craig Peterson: hate this stuff, man. here's, what's been happening. People who have not been securing their machines properly. Their machines have been taken over and they become part of what's called a botnet. Now you, you wouldn't know unless you were using more professional software, right? Your, your regular antivirus, your Norton, et cetera, is not going to pick this up. You need to do it right. And that's part of what we try and talk about on the weekends, how to do it, right. How to keep your business and personal computers safe. But what's happening right now is they are using these machines again, part of this bot net to spam people. So there's a spam Trojan called as [00:07:00] you mentioned, emotet.  It is sending out malicious emails again by the millions. And it has, it's been dormant really now since early this year, which has been nice because the amount of spam has been down, but it is coming back up again. It is sending malicious documents. It's utilizing URLs in there that you click on. And many times it's using hacked WordPress sites. So remember if your business and you have an online website. Make sure you remember to patch it up as well. It's not just your laptops, your windows, desktops, it's your servers. It's your web servers. And in many cases, the hosting sites that we're using to host our WordPress and other websites, that many cases they are not being kept up to date by the vendor. You have to do it [00:08:00] yourself. Matt Gagnon: His name is Greg Peterson. You hear him on this very network on Saturdays at one o'clock for his show, where he goes into much of this in more detail. Craig, thanks so much for joining us this morning and giving us the tech update. We'll talk again next week. Craig Peterson: Hey, take care of Mr. Matt. Matt Gagnon: Appreciate it. ---  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553  

Welcome! Craig discusses DNS and DNS Hacking and why DNS is so important if you are worried about security. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: The rise and fall of Adobe Flash National Security Agency warns that VPNs could be vulnerable to cyberattacks Schools already struggled with cybersecurity. Then came COVID-19 Study Finds 15 Billion Stolen, Exposed Credentials in Criminal Markets As Offices Reopen, Hardware from Home Threatens Security Augmented reality heads-up displays for cars are finally a real thing Android 10 has the fastest update rate ever, hits 16% of users in 10 months Twitter breach exposes one of tech's biggest threats: Its own employees --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Craig Peterson: Hey, it only took 17 years to patch. It can't be that bad. Can it? Hello, Microsoft. Why have you had the brakes on this for so long and what it means to you? Hey everybody, Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me. We're going to talk right now about a couple of things. One of these is the bug that took Microsoft 17 years to fix that you better fix right now. Because it's in the wild. Yes, indeed. we're going to talk about Adobe flash, that little pesky pieces software that we've been using for many, many years, but as it turns out, it's been a real pain, right. Buggy stuff, you know, really the two big ones that you have to worry about all the time. Have been Flash and have been Java. Both of those have had more than their fair share of nightmares associated with [00:01:00] them. I just hate some of this stuff because it has been so nasty. So buggy, it's hard to even think about when you get right down to it. Right. Well, here's, what's going on right now with Microsoft here. There was a,  released the, just here within the last week. That fixes what appears to be a very dangerous, so longstanding bug in Windows DNS. Now DNS is the domain name system. The domain name service is what I've called it for years. We go into a lot of detail on DNS in our hacker killer course. We, basically have to because you need to understand the DNS and how it works. If you're going to run an office and all of the computers in it. Right. So we go into a whole lot of detail on that, but DNS. [00:02:00] The bottom line is what you type into your browser. So Craig Peterson dot com for instance, and turns it into an address like one, two, three main street, any town USA. Even with the zip code. So it turns it into this, this set of octet in IPV four nomenclature, IPV six, it's just this massive, huge address that can address anything that mankind should be able to make over the next year and thousand years, maybe more you can address every pebble of sand on a beach. Okay. It's just a huge amount of address space. So DNS is important for your computer, cause it's not just typing google.com or Craig peterson.com or it could be bank of america.com into the browser. It's all of the software on your computer that is using the internet. Because in order to get from your computer to the computer, it really wants to talk to. It needs to know the address. [00:03:00] So what happens is it asks your ISP typically. So, you know, again, when you computer boots that use the DHCP, it gets an IP address. Again, we cover all of this in the hacker killer course, but it gets an IP address and when it gets that information from your DHCP server, it's also getting an IP address for the DNS server. Now sometimes the DNS server is your ISP internet service provider, like a Comcast or the telephone company, the, or whomever it is your using to get on the internet. And that's frankly, pretty common. That's where it's located out there for your ISP, from your ISP. So what'll happen is your computer will now go and ask your ISP computer. [00:04:00] How do I get to Craig peterson.com all at least what's the address of Craig peterson.com getting there? Well, that's a lot more detailed. We probably won't get into that on the show, but involves OSPF and BGP and just all kinds of other running protocols. But anyhow, I'll have to see the address. I need to get there. So when Microsoft wants to do an update, It uses the name. So it goes to update.microsoft.com. This is an example, right? In reality, it goes to a bunch of different sites, or when the Adobe software update or when Google software, anything wants to update or use a resource like a database online. It's going to go to DNS. DNS is just that important. Now there have been some problems with DNS over the years, and one of the biggest problems is how can I be sure that I'm talking to an authoritative server. In other words, if I want Craig Peterson's IP address and I get it back from a DNS server. Do I really know that's Craig or is that some hacker? [00:05:00] That's trying to get me to go to their site instead of my bank site. So one of the ways that were put together here to try and fix this problem is DNS sec. There are some other ones out there now that are some I don't like. They're using DNS over HTTPS, which is a very simple solution. A cloud flare has it, OpenDNS has it, almost everybody has it. It is built into Firefox. Now it is built into a Chrome ish, they're rolling it out. But here's what happens with that. Instead of asking your ISP for the address for the bank, it sets up a secure. Tunnel effectively and SSL tunnel to either CloudFlare or open DNS or one of these other. [00:06:00] So it goes directly there and says, Hey, what's the IP address for TD bank? And at that point secure. So if I'm asking my ISP using regular DNS for an address. In reality, somebody could be sitting in between. What the hackers have been doing lately is if you have a consumer-grade router, which is most small businesses, frankly we walk into is just kind of crazy. But if you have a consumer-grade router and that router is not patched up. You've got problems. Now we've been into places where they've been diligent and applying patches the problem is that they haven't issued patches. This one place we went to, just a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. Yeah. I'm certain, I'm certain, I'm certain.  I go there every week and double-check and yes, indeed. This is the firmware version that I'm supposed to have installed. When I checked on my router, it's got that firmware version. So. I'm up to date. So then we went with her and we had a little bit of a closer look at it turns out. [00:07:00] Yeah. Yeah, she was pretty diligent, but the vendor had not released patches in over two years.  So again, that's why you don't use any of the consumer stuff. That's why you got to stick with prosumer. If you're. On the cheap side, if you had to keep it cost down. And you're not really that concerned about security, but you don't want this to happen to you as well as a thousand other things. And that's why we have a full prosumer package that we sell. That's all the hardware you need. And it's all automatically kept up to date and with getting machines and functioning properly with all the latest, you know, anti-malware software. So that prosumer stuff is important, but here's what happens. [00:08:00]They've been going on and connecting to routers just randomly. They just cycle through all of these addresses on the internet and they find a router that is vulnerable to the attack, and then they change the firmware in it so that your computer now asks them what the IP address is for your bank. So you type in TD bank.com. Your computer says, okay, who am I supposed to ask about this? Oh yeah, yeah. I'm supposed to ask my router about it. Cause that's what I found out from DHCP. So it goes ahead and asks the router about it. The router says, yeah I know bank of America or TD, or where was it you're going to?  It doesn't really matter. Here's an IP address in Russia you should be going to. We're seeing this happening by the tens of thousands now. So Microsoft has been trying to work their way around it. How can we do that? How do we know that an IP address is legitimate and they really messed up? [00:09:00] Okay. This is called SIGRed. It not only exploits Windows DNS, but it's what's called a wormable bug. Which means it can crawl through other machines once it's on your network. So be very, very careful. Both Checkpoint and Microsoft say this is a critical flaw. It scores a 10 out of 10 on the CVSs common vulnerability scoring system. This is bad. Make sure. You've got this patched. It's affecting practically every small and medium-sized organization in the world. It's gone unnoticed for 17 years, but no longer.  Hey, stick around. We're going to be right back. We're going to be talking about flash and a whole lot more. Make sure you're on my list. So all of this work, I've done setting up this new studio doesn't go to waste and you can attend all of these free pieces of training. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Craig discusses Twitter and the Insider Hack/Phishing for Bitcoin Scam against celebrities. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: The rise and fall of Adobe Flash National Security Agency warns that VPNs could be vulnerable to cyberattacks Schools already struggled with cybersecurity. Then came COVID-19 Study Finds 15 Billion Stolen, Exposed Credentials in Criminal Markets As Offices Reopen, Hardware from Home Threatens Security Augmented reality heads-up displays for cars are finally a real thing Android 10 has the fastest update rate ever, hits 16% of users in 10 months Twitter breach exposes one of tech's biggest threats: Its own employees --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Craig Peterson: You've probably heard about the big problems happening for the big names out there. Uncle Joe's giving away millions, Elon Musk. That's what we're going to start by talking about. How could he miss this? Right. It happened on Wednesday this week. I talked about it Thursday morning on the radio, a few different places, in fact, and hopefully, you might have picked it up on my podcast too. Twitter is in quite the uproar right now because of this particular little problem. Many, many people are very, very upset and they're upset because. Twitter got hacked. Now, this isn't hacked in the normal terms, right? Normally when you think of hack, you think of oh there are bad guys and they're maybe trying to hit the router and trying to get in through the router and trying to take over everything. [00:01:00] It looks like what happened here, is that a few famous people's accounts were compromised in a very, very big way. It's kind of scary. I'm going to just double-check the latest news on this because frankly, it is just shocking. But here's the bottom line, there are a number of high profile accounts and they're all accounts that have that little blue checkmark next to it. Right? You've seen that before on Twitter.  It turns out that Twitter was very unprepared to handle this hack and they ended up turning off all of these accounts. It is just absolutely amazing. Twitter stock, of course, took a nosedive and pre-market opening here on Thursday and it was kinda everybody. [00:02:00] Well, we had Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates. The very top. President Trump was not hacked. I have my theories about why that was. Apple was hacked and many others. Now, at least one of Twitter's own employees appears to have been involved in this particular hack. What happened was apparently, right we'll find out more, the FBI is investigating. Apparently what happened is the there's a tool kind of a God mode tool. Do you remember that with Uber? Where Uber employees who were watching where you and I were going, but okay. They didn't care about us, but they want to know where Beyonce was going and all of these other stars and where were they coming from, and what were their home addresses? Some of them were selling that information. Okay. Not good news so that God-mode on Uber got misused. Well, as it turns out here on the Twitter front, they have a similar function. Where you can go in and look at anybody's account. [00:03:00] Now, I mentioned Beyonce because there is a picture that was posted on [00:03:00] Twitter and taken down and posted and taken to heaven and posted of Beyonce's account using this kind of God mode. That's my phrase here, God mode account software. It was showing everything about Beyonce. What she was doing, her account was verified. She had her own domain, et cetera, et cetera. Well, late last year, the Department of Justice charged two Twitter employees with providing private information from Twitter to Saudi Arabian nationals, according to CNBC. What happened here with the hack in case you're not aware we'll back up a little bit here. [00:04:00] But these accounts were taken over apparently and they were used to send a message. Now, the message they sent was kind of shocking. It was, "Hey, I'm giving back here or due to the COVID-19" or, "You know, Uncle Joe Biden, he's always given away money." So he said, "Hey, listen, if you over the next four hours if you send me on Twitter Bitcoin to this Bitcoin account number, I'll double it." "I will double it and I'll send the money back to you." "So now you get to have a thousand dollars worth of Bitcoin. Well, now you get $2,000 with a Bitcoin, and apparently there was one guy from Japan who sent $40,000 worth of Bitcoin to the account." Well, the bad guys. I count was apparently just opened up this week and the money was moved very quickly from that Twitter account to other accounts online, which makes a lot of sense, right. Shuffle that money around, make it harder to track. All of that money is now in their hands because one of the reasons bad guys use Bitcoin is that Bitcoin has no way to return the money, to scrape it back, let's put it that way. In other words, if I send money to a Bitcoin wallet, it is there it is gone. Goodbye. Good luck. There's no way for me to take that money back. [00:05:00] So there's well over a hundred thousand dollars that I'm going to say it here, that some stupid people sent to people using Bitcoin on Twitter. You know what really, really, how could you do that? It just doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to me, but apparently it did. [00:06:00] Now, Twitter is saying that there was no real coordination between the hackers. Twitter saying that this was social engineering. Now, this is something I cover pretty extensively in my hacker killer cybersecurity course. The whole concept of social engineering, these are the phishing emails, these are phone calls that you might get pretending that it's somebody from it or whatever it might be. Those are all social engineering attacks and those attacks can really cause just incredible amounts of problems for you and me and for very, very good reason as well. Right. Because if we cooperate, unknowingly by clicking on the link, You know, going to a website and then entering information. Or in this case, we see a message from a blue checkmark Twitter account. The message says, send me money on Bitcoin. One of them said, Hey, I really want to promote Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin's the future. Which, of course, is what Bitcoin wants you to think. Right. They're going to be sitting there and saying, yeah, you're right. You're right. They're going to wait. We should be going all these fools with their bank accounts. They should be using Bitcoin. You are right. So it says, Bitcoin is a wave the future, and I really want to promote it. I really, I want to help you people who've been trying to promote it. So over there next, whatever it was, 30 minutes, four hours, if you send me Bitcoin,  Oh, doubled it. I'm giving back. Elon Musk was one of the accounts that sent this out as well. So there's a little slight degree of, you know, okay. This could be true. [00:07:00] But in reality, this goes back to what we've known for years. If it seems too good to be true, it's not true. Right? So maybe some of these Twitter employees were scammed using these phishing attacks. Maybe not. We've certainly seen it before with insiders. We've seen Facebook employees, stocking people. Remember, it's not just employees nowadays, these tools that we're talking about, these God mode type tools. Are given to contractors from all of these major companies, Uber we mentioned already, but Facebook, we already know Facebook has people who are online using these tools to decide whether or not the censor President Trump, right. [00:08:00] Or you or me. Or watching videos on YouTube and deciding whether or not that should be demonetized because, Oh my gosh, you said something that, you know, a 0.01% of the people might be upset about. And I'm one of that 0.01%. So I'm going to demonetize you, which means. In the real world terms, Hey, listen, if you are a conservative and do you have a YouTube channel and you say something, they don't like, you're not going to be able to make any money from that YouTube video. We see that all the time from Prager University and many conservative speakers. So did 200 employees cooperate with the hackers, hard to say right now, Given that last fall, Saudi Arabia was able to get a couple of Twitter employees to kind of flip for them. Then the answer to that is kind of maybe. [00:09:00]How long did it take to stop hackers? It took hours to stop them. Unfortunately, the last thing was posted, I think, Wednesday night at about 6:00 PM. So it took a while and Twitter attempted to slow this whole thing down. They blocked verified accounts, which means if you had an, a verified account and there are a lot of them out there, a lot of us in the media, in the training realm and celebrities, we have blue checks, by our names. I don't, okay. But many people do. So because of that, and because of the fact that a lot of these blue check accounts were being used for the scam, twitter said, okay, no more postings from blue check accounts. All right. So it took a while. It was just a Bitcoin scam. It could have been a lot worse. And there are a lot of businesses out there that use Twitter in order to disseminate information in real-time. So all of those businesses, and that includes a lot of entertainment businesses really got nailed by this. [00:10:00] I think when you start looking into this a little bit more deeply, We learn it something, there are a few things to learn, but one of the big things that we learned from this is you cannot count on using some of these platforms that are online, you can count on using some of them for your business and keeping your data safe. Because again, and again, and again, you know, all the way back to 20 years ago, these even the earliest social media sites were plagued by people who were working there. Who were giving the information way? Okay. President Trump's account was not hacked apparently, really. They were probably able to access private information. Cause you remember, they had this God mode, as I call it. Type tool that they were using. So that's kind of a very big deal. All right. We only got about a half, half a minute left here, so let's talk about what's up next. [00:11:00] We've got to talk about this, Microsoft. This is a very, very, very big deal. There's a patch out there right now. We'll tell you about that. We're going to talk also about Google. We've mentioned them before and tracking users and selling user's data. They're getting sued again because apparently. Google has not learned. Hey, make sure you visit me online. Go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. I've almost got my news studio all done here. We're going to do a lot more pieces of training, a lot more live training, and we're probably going to start offering some of my courses again as well, but stick around because we'll be right back. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Craig discusses The End of Flash and what caused its demise. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: The rise and fall of Adobe Flash National Security Agency warns that VPNs could be vulnerable to cyberattacks Schools already struggled with cybersecurity. Then came COVID-19 Study Finds 15 Billion Stolen, Exposed Credentials in Criminal Markets As Offices Reopen, Hardware from Home Threatens Security Augmented reality heads-up displays for cars are finally a real thing Android 10 has the fastest update rate ever, hits 16% of users in 10 months Twitter breach exposes one of tech's biggest threats: Its own employees --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] We're going to talk about killing Flash. Did Steve jobs start the death of Adobe Flash Macromedia? Remember all those guys? Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson and watching me too. I am getting. Good at trying to post stuff on my website and YouTube videos stuff that is, and I've been updating all of my studio here and it may look kind of the same behind me here on the camera, but believe me, there are a lot of differences. We're fixing things, I'm producing more stuff. We are going to be having a great, great. year this year, as we get more and more information to you, just like in the last segment here, where we were talking about DNS and what it means to you and how frankly, this Microsoft bug could be the next big ransomware attack vehicle out there. Absolutely amazing. [00:01:00] Well Flash, of course, you all know Flash, right? I don't need to really show you Flash. It was designed five years ago. Give or take right now maybe a little bit. And the idea behind Flash was let's give the internet some movement. If you weren't around back then in the mid-nineties, the internet was mostly text-based. There were all a whole lot of what we would call brochureware sites at the time. Back in the early nineties, I was, I tried to convince businesses they needed to be online and people just weren't listening to me. It's just not worth the investment. Right. [00:02:00] Of course, now it's people are trying to figure it out. How can I do this? How can I get online? And many people's questions, revolved, run hugger. Make this. More pretty. And that's how Flash kind of started the story on it is absolutely fascinating. And I have it, my website@craigpeterson.com. It goes on for pages and pages, but how these two guys, they struggle. They, I had some success in business. They sold the company eight years. They're trying to figure out what should we do? How should we do this? They kind of stumbled on a couple of things that just did not work at all. They went to a couple of big trade shows and sold absolutely none of their product, which was, has sketching product for some of these early. PDA portable digital assistants that were out there is really kind of a cool product. They only ever sold two of them, by the way. So they tried some things. So if you are an entrepreneur and you are sitting there saying, OMG, it's not selling, I'm not doing the right thing. Everything's coming to an end. [00:03:00] A friend of mine, Steve Pavlina sent out note just this week that I read that I really, really appreciated. He was talking about how we have to stand up for our principles and, and he was specifically talking about our principals, when it comes to our life and our life values, what do we want to do? How do we wanna do it? When do we want to do it? These two guys never gave up and they didn't know exactly what they wanted to do, but they didn't know they wanted to do something. And they wanted to make sure that while they were doing it, they were enjoying it. Right. I guess that makes sense. Certainly seems to make sense to me, as well. So that's exactly what they did. They, they went out and they tried a few different things. As I said, it took him about eight years. Then they came up with this thing that allowed animation. [00:04:00] And if you remember around 96 is when some of this animation really started to hit we're using Flash or are websites where the entire site was coded up using Adobe Flash and Adobe Flash was really cool. It did some wonderful things, frankly. I was quite impressed with it at the time, and I decided I'm going to learn Flash and maybe fly. She's going to be my future as well. It was, it was really cool. They got a review from a writer in a magazine and they don't remember the writer's name, but the writer got a preview copy of it and said, Hey, listen, why don't you add some port for buttons, which was easy for them to do so they quickly added support for play button, fast forward button, rewind buttons. And then they started adding more programmatic stuff to it. And before you know, it. Flash took over the web. And that was kind of around 99, when a foot had graphics that were moving any sort of video, it was all Flash-based. In fact, a lot of the streaming video that was happening back then in the early two thousands was based on Flash, which is really kind of different when you think about it nowadays. Right. [00:05:00] Things went well through the, the arts, if you will, the double ops here at the beginning of the century for them. And they kind of sold out and moved around and Adobe ended up owning it and integrating it with some of the tools that Adobe had, then came 2010. On April 29th, 2010, I've got that right in front of me here. Steve jobs published an open letter. He called it Thoughts on Flash. This was probably the beginning of the end for Flash. Now Flash was already known at the time for some security problems because it was really an almost an operating system more than a programming language. It allowed them to access stuff on the computer, make some changes, move things around, read files. [00:06:00] Does that start to ring bells for you? About how dangerous Flash just might be? Well, it was, and Steve jobs brought that up in his open letter. And he also said in that open letter, the number one reason max crash is Flash. So Steve jobs was complaining about reliability problems, about security problems and about performance problems. We remember what else happened 2010? The iPhone happened. And Steve jobs is working on that. And he decided right then and there that frankly Flash falls short. And those are, those are actually Steve Jobs words, Flash falls short, and it was never included in any version of iOS. So it wasn't on the iPhone. It wasn't on the later introduced iPad. Absolutely nothing. [00:07:00] Well, the industry response was kind of mixed because there are a lot of people who had decided yeah. You know, Flashes the way they had big investments in Flash and they couldn't see it going away. But in November, 2011, Adobe pivoted and adopted the new standard. The one that Steve jobs was promoting than the rest of the internet was behind, it was called HTML five. HTML five allowed your browser to basically act like an operating system. It can actually run multiple programs simultaneously for you, and it could do all of the animation and more than Flash could do it. Could display videos. HTML five is the answer we're still living with today. A decade later almost. And. When Adobe decided that we're not going to be targeting Flash players anymore, but all of our tools, which were originally developed for Flash by these guys. Those tools are now adapted to use and spit out if you will, HTML five. [00:08:00] So did Steve jobs killed Flash? Well yeah, kinda, he started it. But I think Flash, Adobe killed it itself. Certainly in November, 2011, Adobe switching over to its HTML five was a very big deal. They didn't keep up on patches. They didn't keep up on the security problems, you know, and they kind of did, but it was, was the stepchild problem that you have, they just didn't care enough about it. Which is I think a real problem, some great quotes in this article, again, up on Craig peterson.com about what they were doing. They were saying, Hey, listen, this is causing bloating as well. It's not working well on mobile devices because mobile devices don't have as much computeing as a desktop computer does, not even close and they have to use battery. [00:09:00] And so you're doing something heavy, like interpreting Flash on a browser. That's running on Java. That's being interpreted. I know on a little snap dragon chip or whatever, it might be on an Android device. You're really slow and you're really hogging resources. So Flash is gone burry it it's dead. It is no longer supported in many browsers. And by the end of 2020, it's going to be completely gone. Even from Google Chrome. Wow. We are going through fast today. When we get back, we'll get into Google here and how they're getting sued again for tracking people, even though they said they're not. Yes, indeed. Make sure you go online right now. Craig peterson.com/subscribe and we'll be right back. Stick around. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Craig discusses privacy and why what you thought you knew may not be true. Google suits over spying and more.  For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: The rise and fall of Adobe Flash National Security Agency warns that VPNs could be vulnerable to cyberattacks Schools already struggled with cybersecurity. Then came COVID-19 Study Finds 15 Billion Stolen, Exposed Credentials in Criminal Markets As Offices Reopen, Hardware from Home Threatens Security Augmented reality heads-up displays for cars are finally a real thing Android 10 has the fastest update rate ever, hits 16% of users in 10 months Twitter breach exposes one of tech's biggest threats: Its own employees --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Craig Peterson: Hey, are you a devoted user of Google tools? Hey, and you know how to hide stuff online, right? Incognito browser mode. Guess again. This is Craig Peterson. Thanks for joining me again, everybody. Google has had a mixed history of keeping your information safe. Right? One of the big problems with Google is how they make their money. They make their money by what? Selling your data, selling information about you. Selling it to marketers. Heck, they're even selling it to the police and China. They are cooperating with the Chinese government and telling them who the dissidents are. That to me is really rather scary. Right? [00:01:00] Facebook does the same sort of thing in China pretty much. Well, really every US company that has a nexus in China, if they want to be in China, is being forced under the socialist government, to hand over information about anybody that might want a little bit of freedom of choice in their lives. Personally, I think that's a problem. Many people tend to not think that. Now as part of our hacker killer cybersecurity course, I go into a lot of depth about how to keep data safe and secure. Even if you go over to China, believe it or not. But, Hey, listen, if you're going to China, you better have a Macbook and it better be using full disk encryption, and you better be using really good passwords.  I would advise against using their wifi over there, et cetera, et cetera. Anyways, that's the subject for a very in-depth course. We're not going to get into right now. [00:02:00] How do you as a user, keep your information safe from prying eyes. There are obviously some things we don't want people to know that we're searching about. Look at @amazon.com, for instance, if you're looking for certain types of toys on Amazon, it is not going to show those in your general search history. They're not going to just pop up and say on the ad on a website as you're on an oh a so-called family-friendly website that is running ads that are paid for by Google. Maybe a third party who's using Google's data. It's not going to pop up about that little toy that you were searching for over at Amazon at the worst possible time. Right? [00:03:00] We already know that there's data that we don't want to have out there. And many times data are used to blackmail us. We've seen that very frequently recently with the hackers who go on to our computers, particularly our small, medium businesses. Steal the data that's there. They, actually have people who get on your computer and look around on the computers and then all of the other computers on the network to see what kind of information does this guy has, does this company have, right? What can we do to really screw them over? Right. What ends up happening? Well, they get their hands on set information and then they blackmail you. Well, there's nothing illegal necessarily about what a business does. Right? You, you sell a product. But you're concerned about your intellectual property. You're concerned about regulatory fines that might come into play. In fact, almost certainly would come into play in some cases, but how would you like to be the company? Like one of the ones that we came in after the fact. They were just having some email problems. So we started poking around and we found the worst case of infection. Chinese, active Chinese back doors that the FBI Boston field office says they've ever seen. [00:04:00]So that means that you as a business person, and in this case, is a guy in his seventies. Who'd been building this company for decades and had all of these designs, had all of these customers, his pricelist, his everything up there now stolen by the Chinese. That's socialism for you, right? Well, It's one thing to steal it from some poor guy, some schmuck that spent 30 years building it. And then we'll just go ahead and use slave labor in order to make it really cheap. So now you get to compete against your designs and this something that's always bothered me about the tax code.  Here you are struggling for 10, 20, 30 years. We were just in the last segment talking about flash and how they struggled for eight years just to come up with a concept for a business that might work. They had businesses that failed. [00:05:00] So with the tax code. I'm struggling, let's say I'm working for, for 10, 20 years. I'm not even making minimum wage.  I'm going back and forth. I'm trying different things. Then, all of a sudden, after 20 years of hard work, I'm an overnight success, right? Isn't that the way that works, an overnight success, right, that took 20 years. So I make 2 million dollars in that year, 2 million. Now I have to pay huge taxes on that. But wait a minute now, if you amortize it, cause I didn't get paid for the 20 years. I got paid for it at the very end of the 20 years. So how about we say, instead of making $2 million in year 20, I made a hundred thousand thousand dollars a year, right? A lot different tax bracket, right? [00:06:00] Anyways it's something that's always really bothered me. The whole socialist idea of the progressive tax system has really bothered me. But in China, they don't bother with that. If you're a good member of the party, you make more money. We'll steal information for you from American companies. You have no idea how often this is happening. It is absolutely insane. We've been involved in at least one of the 1000 investigations that are underway right now by the FBI. They just don't have enough time to investigate them all. So now he has lost his 20 years' worth of building this company to the socialists, who are now going to should be selling his product. Now, remember they didn't have to spend money developing this. They didn't have to spend money on the failures, the things that didn't work, the marketing that didn't work, the products that didn't work, the integrations that didn't work. They didn't have to spend the 20 years learning how to do all of this stuff. Figuring it out on the back of an envelope, all the way through, on, on a computer diagram system. They didn't have to do any of that. No, all they had to do was steal it. Right. [00:07:00] So you are a regular, small business person. You're a home user, whatever it is. So how do you keep your data safe? You know, this reminds me, I have a series of tutorials on keeping your browsers safe. I'm thinking maybe I should release those again. Maybe put them together as a little package. Let me know if you guys think I should. These plugins are going to help keep you safe. Email me@craigpeterson.com. If you think that's a good idea, me, ME@CraigPeterson.com. How to keep your online browsing experience safe. I've got others too but, you know, I think that's important. [00:08:00] What do you do tell people are using incognito mode on their browsers, right? It's called different things in different browsers on the Google Chrome browser, call it incognito mode. There was a suit filed last month filed against Google, saying that Google was tracking people, even when they had incognito mode turned on. There was a lawsuit filed this last Tuesday that alleges that Google tracks, user activity through hundreds of thousands of apps, even after people opt-out of sharing information. This is a good article by CNET. You'll find it on CNET Angela Lang wrote or she's got some decent stuff. I've got up on my website@craigpeterson.com, but this is a very, very big deal because the lawsuit is seeking class-action status, which means that these individuals that are involved in the suit are saying, Hey, we want thousands of people potentially in on the suit. Very, very big deal. [00:09:00]Last month, the same law firm filed another suit, related to privacy and Google's Chrome browser. So CNET said, we reached out to Google, of course, they didn't respond in time. Isn't that the norm here? The suits filed it in the US district court for the Northern District of California. So it's in the ninth circus. We're not going to get into a whole bunch of the suit. You can find out more on my website or just do a search online, duck, duck, go search. Here's the bottom line incognito mode, it does not stop people from tracking you. You're still sending requests out. Remember we talked about DNS before the domain name, service or system DNS. Well, that's another way to track you. [00:10:00] What websites are you going to? What IP addresses are you visiting? What websites are you looking up? All of this stuff is a way to track you. So. Incognito mode isn't really doing much other than stopping certain cross-site cookies from being looked at. So it's a real, real problem. Now I have some training specifically on all of this browser safety and security and privacy, but the bottom line, if you want privacy, I would say stick with Safari, just for the general user. Now, in my courses would go into a lot more detail on different browsers, when you might want to use a tor browser, versus Epic, versus Safari, Firefox, et cetera. [00:11:00] In reality for the 80% rule, Safari is going to get you a long way because Safari is from Apple. Apple does not make money off of your information. Google does. Apple does not. Apple makes money by selling you hardware, and by selling you services. And that's why it's a little bit safer. Right now, by the way, Apple is in their promotion saying we are 50% faster than Google Chrome. As well as more secure and Google Chrome has removed some of the support for some of the ad word blockers and other things, things that you might want to be using. So Google Chrome's falling a little bit out of favor. However, on the other hand, you've got Microsoft with their latest incarnation of the Epic browser, which isn't the EPIC browser, which isn't the Epic browser. Which isn't isn't Internet Explorer. It's crazy. And we go into a lot of depth on some of that stuff on my courses. [00:12:00] But Microsoft Epic is now actually Google Chrome under the hood. Anyhow, stick around. We've got a lot more to talk about her at the start of the hour, and I appreciate you being with me. Make sure you go right now to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Get on my free newsletter list and I'll be sending you information about some of the training. If you're interested in being in some of the FBLives. Stuff for the webinars or watching the videos. That's how you find out. It's like what we're doing right now only better. CraigPeterson.com/subscribe. Stick around. We'll be back on some stations we won't and others and of the course, we're on YouTube and CraigPeterson.com too. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Good morning, everybody. I was on a special appearance with Jim Polito this morning to discuss this huge Twitter hack and what happened and what can be done about it. Here we go with Jim. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com ---  Automated Machine Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Craig Peterson: So they had this God mode they got in trouble for. Well, it really seriously looks like, and there is a similar God mode on Twitter. It's a special appearance, command appearance, right? Yeah. Craig Peterson here and Jim Polito wanted to go into the details behind this Twitter hack. What happened? Why did it happen? What can we do about it? Does it really matter? Well, that's exactly what we were talking about. Jim Polito: Here's a funny one. There was a big Twitter hack yesterday and Steve Fourni, Western Mass producer sent me a text. Hey, Mr. blue check, did you get hacked. Like no. Nobody's going to hack me. There's no money to be had. [00:01:00] And, and who's going to accept, uh, a message from Jim Polito. But if you got a message from say, Barack Obama or Joe Biden, maybe you could be swindled out of some Bitcoin. Joining us now to sort this all out a special appearance. And we appreciate the extra time from him. Our good friend and tech talk guru, Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir. Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning, Jim. Glad to be back. Jim Polito: Thanks for coming. Uh, I appreciate it. I know you were here Tuesday with the guys while I was off. So thanks for coming back. So what, what exactly happened? And here's my worry, I'm hearing. This was an inside job. So what's being done at these companies to protect people, you know, uh, people like me, Craig, you know, not just me, but others. Is this an inside job at Twitter? Craig Peterson: Well, think of all of the people yourself included, obviously, but businesses use Twitter to disseminate real-time news. This is a very, very big deal. And 10 years ago, you might remember Twitter got fined. [00:02:00] They paid a fine too, I think it was the FTC thing that, uh, they straightened out their act too, because back then, They got hacked again. So here's what it looks like happened. This is kind of interesting. This is from an article on vice.com, but one of the sources told the reporters here that this is a quote. We used a rep that literally done all the work for us. And they say that they paid this rep and there were some pictures posted of a tool. Now, do you remember the whole God mode, controversy with, you know, um, yeah? With, with the driving app? Jim Polito: Uber, Uber. Craig Peterson: Uber, why can't I remember Uber is fun. Jim Polito: Well, 'cause you're brilliant and you get too much stuff in the brain as Einstein did. So we would forget his address, you know, [00:03:00] Craig Peterson: With Uber, they had this thing called God mode and it turned out that their employees and contractors were sharing exactly where various celebrities were in Uber cars, where they were picked up, they figured out where their homes were because of course, that's where the phone sleeps at night, right. Is in people's homes. So they had this God mode, they got in trouble for, well, it really seriously looks like, and there is a similar God mode on Twitter. Apparently Twitter has an app and screenshots of it were posted on Twitter and have been shared elsewhere, that I'll allow people who are using this tool to do anything. And it's fine. This screenshot was posted on Twitter of Beyonce's account in this tool, in this God mode where they can get into your account can basically do anything. [00:04:00]  So what looks like what happened here is that there was, and this is according to Twitter. Now, this is a statement from Twitter. Some of their employees were manipulated using social engineering. So some of the employees that according to Twitter were manipulated into giving this God mode application access to this hacker group. The hacker group is saying, no, no, no. We planted somebody inside of Twitter that gave us access to it. The FBI is now involved. Investigating this thing, because what happened is you've been mentioning this morning is that they have these various accounts and then they started sharing messages. So for instance, uncle Joe Biden was posting things saying, Hey, listen, Then guys, you know, we, we really care about [00:05:00] you so here's what I'm going to do. They did various things on different accounts, but the bottom line message across the board was I want to give back now. This is what Elon Musk said, uncle Joe, said, uh, you know, For the next 30 minutes or in some cases it was for the next four hours, et cetera. If you send the Bitcoin, I'm going to give back, I'm going to double whatever amount of Bitcoin you send me and I'll double it and send it back. Now, all of these accounts were very big accounts. You've been mentioning the name of some of these accounts that were up there. Very, very prominent accounts like President Obama and of course, President Trump, apparently he was not hacked.  I don't know if I'd call this a hack when they're using a God mode application treated by Twitter. Right. But, um, his account wasn't used for this.  Apparently there's more than a hundred thousand dollars that have been sent to them in this Bitcoin account. [00:06:00] Now, for those that don't know, Bitcoin is a type of virtual currency. It's called a cryptocurrency. Now the reason bad guys love bitcoin is that you can share it, not really anonymously, but somewhat anonymously. Our government does have ways of tracing this. I heard a lecture by a secret service member about how, they cracked some of these online organizations. But the thing that liked the most about it is you can send money by a bitcoin. And there's absolutely no way to get that money back. Once you've spent that money. There are people. All over the world. Yeah. That has been sending this guy or these guys money. Uh, one apparently in Japan as much as $40,000 in one transaction, I guess he, he really feels the burn. [00:07:00] Yeah. It's just incredible Jim Polito: Were talking with our good friend, Craig Peterson, tech talk guru. No, no need to look at your watch or your calendar. No, it is Thursday, but he's back here because of this situation with Twitter. So first of all, I mean the obvious advice to everybody is, uh, if you start seeing messages like that, uh, from, uh, uncle Joe Biden or Barack Obama or anyone else, uh, if it's too good to be true, It's too good. [00:08:00]  It's like those messages I used to get that Bill Gates is giving away his, um, uh-huh. Millions of dollars and if you copy this email to 10 friends, you know, you'll, you'll get a piece of it, you know, yadda, yada, yada, and people believe it. You know, I mean, that's kind of slowed down a little bit. So you needed something more creative than people would believe, but you know, I don't think uncle Joe's going to be sending me any message soon. Yeah. I don't think Craig Peterson: First of all, giving away money. Yeah, what's new in there, right? Jim Polito: Well, but you'd be huge. He's giving away your money, you know, like tax dollars, but, but giving away his own money and then you have to do it through Bitcoin. No, thank you. Craig Peterson: And this isn't the first time this type of thing has happened. Facebook employees were using their privileged app to stalk women. Snapchat workers had a tool called Snap Lion that gave permission information on users. Myspace employees use their tool called Overlord to spy on users back in the day. Jim Polito: I was just going to say my ma my space. I mean, it wasn't that done in hieroglyphics. [00:09:00] Is that how old that didn't you need the Rosetta stone to be able to translate the trip around me based on tablets. Craig Peterson: Yeah. That's that was so I guess, Jim Polito:  I guess these companies need to be a lot more selective about who gets this God mode, this mode, where they can do whatever they want, which is probably necessary to fix some issues. But hi, they better be very careful with who they give this to. Craig Peterson: You know, they're not being that careful, frankly, from what I've seen, look at Facebook recently, the news, because of problems with people who are doing the monitoring, who are saying, well, you can post this. You can't, that are like a third-party. So, yeah, these, these tools are in the hands of not just employees, the contractors, and they're falling for scams, according to Facebook, but according to the hackers, and this has been reported a few places online, according to the hackers, this was kind of an inside job. They got someone inside there, they turned them, or got them in there in the first place and had free reign. It's no different than people getting an insider at a bank or a jewelry store or something else like they did in the old days. Jim Polito: Craig Peterson, Hey, Craig, let's give out, let's give out your information in case folks want to reach out to you and um, and then you'll be back Tuesday, which is great. [00:10:00] Absolutely. You can just email me. Craig peterson.com. It's M E at Craig peterson.com or a hit or miss with the texting. I gotta get this thing fixed. You can just text me at (855) 385-5553. I've just been too busy lately. The standard data and text rates apply. I appreciate it, I know you are busy and I appreciate you coming in today for some extra duty and helping us out with, to understand this and we'll catch up with you Tuesday, Craig. Craig Peterson: Alright, take care, Jim. Thanks Jim Polito: You too. ---  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Good morning everybody! I was on with Matt this morning and we had a good discussion about the technology and cyberthreats that schools are facing and why as well as what is happening to the corporate networks of businesses that are in the process of reopening.  Let's get into my conversation with Matt on WGAN. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Craig Peterson: Who knows what I need to control peripherals like thumb drives hard drives other devices to their corporate laptops. They might've hooked up to their little files server in that house. Craig Peterson here. Hey, if you listen to these podcasts a lot, you've probably noticed that most of these people that I interviewed with most of these radio hosts tend to ask about the same articles. In case you don't know, I put together usually eight articles every week. I kind of boil down the week's news to the top articles. There's a, I guess, a little bit of inside baseball and put together a summary paragraph or two, usually from those articles. And sometimes if I really disagree with the article, it'll be just original would be what I have to say about it. I send them off to all these different radio stations and then they have me on and they pick and choose. So like this particular interview, we talked about three of the different topics. And often we're talking about much the same thing. And. I try and take a bit of a different angle, so I don't get boring for you guys listening. [00:01:00] But today it was kinda interesting. Matt had a different take. He was interested in some different articles today. So, you know, that's the way it goes. Variety's the spice of life, right? Yes, indeed. Hey, and my new studio. Is getting close to being finished. So,  I'm going to be doing a lot more training coming up here soon. Take care of everybody. Yeah, here we go. In Maine with Matt on WGAN. Matt Gagnon: Happy Wednesday friends. It's time to talk to Craig Peterson. Our tech guru joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology. Craig. Welcome. Craig Peterson: Hey, thank you. Matt Gagnon: Pleasure to have you as always. So let's kick things off here. [00:02:00] With a question about schools. I know obviously we were all talking about whether or not we're going to be going back in the fall, with our kids in K through 12 education. But we do know what happened before in the last semester, they all stayed home and they were working from home and learning from home or whatever. And I know that the schools already were struggling with cybersecurity issues, to begin with, with, then COVID-19 happened. Right? And then things changed. So tell me about this. Craig Peterson: Yeah, things changed. Things changed pretty badly, you know, just in the last 30 days. More than seven and a half million malware incidences were detected affecting education worldwide.  That is a lot of malware instances. And when we look at what's been happening in our schools, it has been a real problem. You know, the schools are unable to attract or retain or pay, or whatever it might be, the talent that really does understand what's happening in the cyber world. [00:03:00] Now it isn't just schools. There still is a shortage of cybersecurity professionals, in the order of, depending on whose numbers you believe one and a half to two and a half million open jobs right now.  So when you look at something like our schools that tend to pay a lot less than some of the businesses, do they have limited resources? It becomes a problem. The FBI's even warning about that right now that they just cannot, the schools cannot dedicate enough resources to network defense. They're vulnerable to cyber attacks. We've seen many school districts that have been nailed. Throughout New England, with ransomware and have had student information stolen. [00:04:00] Then on top of it, as you pointed out, we've caught our latest infection here, the latest plague, it has driven us all home. Now we're looking at what are the right solutions? You know, do we have teachers that are concerned about health issues and might be older, or they might be having some general underlying health problem, do those teachers stay home and teach from home as opposed to keeping the students at home? These students at home here in Maine, we've got all kinds of different data rates, different problems, they're different equipment at home. It's just an absolute nightmare. When you look at some of this stuff that's been going on. I just don't know what the right answer is.  Certainly, we've got huge problems with kids being at home and trying to connect to the schools and trying to keep their information safe. Matt Gagnon: We're speaking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time every Wednesday that, is our time to talk to him. And by the way, you can hear him on this very station on Saturdays at one o'clock for the Craig Peterson show, where he goes into the stuff, in more depth. I, you know, the other thing about this, it's very, you know, in a similar vein here as offices are reopening. [00:05:00]Tho, the stuff that we've been doing at home and our hardware at home is also its own security threat. Is that not true? Craig Peterson: It is. It is a threat, even now, before some of these people return to the offices because so many of the employees have connected, you know, who knows what uncontrolled peripherals. Like thumb drives, hard, drives, other devices to their corporate laptops. They might've hooked up to their little file server in that house. These peripherals are potentially cyber-attack tools used by bad actors. Look at the firewalls that we keep warning about this. So many of us have in our homes these consumer-grade firewalls that are under constant attack that are becoming a very big problem now for the businesses. [00:06:00] We have to, as businesses now, reach out into our employee's homes. Now that gets to be an interesting problem, but we have to reach into their homes and secure the networks of our employees. Now, some businesses have said, well, we're just going to use a VPN, frankly, that just causes other problems. The research is right now is showing, that 25% of devices on home networks, including PCs, printers, smart home products had one or more services exposed on the internet. 25% of home devices. It means ultimately it's a lot easier to hack when the bad guys can get at it directly from the internet. Matt Gagnon: Speaking of hacking Craig Peterson, our tech guru, who joins us at this time every Wednesday, there's a new study out that says that 15 billion stolen and exposed credentials are, have been sort of found in criminal markets. Tell us a little bit about this. Craig Peterson: [00:07:00] Yeah, this is a very, very bad thing. And I wanted to really direct people to a website called "Have I been pwned? Matt Gagnon: Oh yeah. I remember that. Yeah. That's a dated internet reference of I've heard one. Yeah. Craig Peterson: Yeah, it kinda is. It goes way back. Have I been, poned (spelled PWNED) allows you to put in your email address that you use for signing into all these websites and tells you if your data is readily available on the dark web, what data is available, where it was stolen because when we're looking this study, that's saying 15 billion stolen, exposed credentials. They're not kidding. Now you might say, well, wait a minute, a sanity check. There aren't 15 billion people in the world. Just like there aren't 245 million women voters here in the United States, to quote are one of the presidential candidates. [00:08:00] Here's the problem. These credentials have been stolen multiple times. From multiple places and are for sale in underground marketplaces out there, and your credentials, it's just crazier. Here's what it's worth, right? It can take you 500 hours over the course of years to clear up all of the damage the bad guys do to your credit in all of these accounts, et cetera. What it's worth is, right now, the price is about $3,000 for an admin account or a domain admin account. So if your credentials are used to control a Microsoft server, there in the office, that's worth about three grand. $70 for your bank account information, now. $21 for account access to your antivirus account and less than $10 for credentials for some of these adult sites out there, by the way, usernames and passwords for just regular sites are worth less than $2 each. [00:09:00] 500 hours of your time is worth at what at $10 an hour, let's say $5,000. And in fact, you're worth less than a hundred dollars to the bad guys. It is crazy. Matt Gagnon: That's encouraging. Yeah. Paying more attention. At least make it worth more than five grand. Yeah.  Well, Craig Peterson, our tech guru was nice to have to join us every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology. Thanks again, Craig, as always make sure you hear him on this very station on Saturday and we'll talk to you next week. Craig Peterson: Alright. Take care, Matt. Thanks. That was it with Mr. Matt today.  I'll be back this weekend with another show. I ended up doing kind of a half and a half last weekend. Half of it was brand new and half of it was a repeat, I've just been feeling very, very under the weather, although I'm doing a lot better now, take care, everybody, and thanks for your time and comments too. I got some messages from you guys. When I mentioned that I probably had the COVID it's saying, you know, just [00:10:00] some words of encouragement and support are really, really appreciate it. All of those. So take care of everybody. Bye-bye. ---  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Good morning, everybody. I was on with Steve Fourni sitting in for the vacationing Jim Polito and we discussed Adobe Flash and why it went from Cool to Get it off my machine and why VPNs may not be keeping you safe. Here we go with Steve. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com ---  Automated Machine Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Craig Peterson: They might not realize it, but you probably have not been using it for a year or more. And if you're an Apple iOS user, you've never used it. Whoa, man. Things are moving fast this morning. Craig Peterson here, I was on with. Steve Forni on a couple of stations down in mass, WHYN and WTAG covering central Western Mass parts of Rhode Island and Vermont and Connecticut. And we were talking about three or four different things. But to me, the thing that mattered the most was this discussion about VPNs at home and at work. Anyhow, here we go with this morning's radio hit. Steve Fourni: After the eight 30 news on Tuesdays, we bring in our tech talk guru prey. Craig Peterson has got all kinds of good stuff for us today. Good morning, Craig. How are you, sir? Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning. I'm doing really, really well. You know, living West of the four [00:01:00] 95, it's just a different world. Isn't it? Somehow there's no COVID testing. No nothing. Steve Fourni: We're just a, we're living in our own little world out here. Aren't we? It's unbelievable. Craig Peterson: Yeah, it's unbelievable. And now we've got our own time zones, not their own area code it's yeah, Steve Fourni: yeah. It's we're yeah. We're we might as well just start. Our own form of government will be the people's republic of western mass of, the other two-thirds of the state. thanks for listening to the show, Craig. Craig Peterson: It's a great show. I've enjoyed it. I've enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to Jim coming back. You've been great, Steve. Steve Fourni: Thank you. I appreciate that. And I'm also looking forward to Jim's return. But you got all kinds of good stuff for us today. Let's start with something that I never understood. Why all of a sudden Adobe flash player went from the only thing to use to borderline dangerous. Do not get the Flash upgrade. Do not do this. I don't know what happened there, but maybe you can tell us a little bit about Adobe flash player and what happened. [00:02:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah, I've been warning about it here for a few years out. It wasn't really great because Flash was the first time on the internet that we actually saw things moving and it was so cool. It was so easy to do. I remember when I first author tool to make these flash little animated videos, advertisers started using them. All of a sudden, everything was jumping out at you and moving around. Well, like so many things today, including Zoom, Flash was created in a hurry in a big hurry by people who did not understand the implications of what they were doing. They continued to add features to flash. [00:03:00] So it wasn't just like move this little guy let's animate something. Yeah, it was, well, you know what? We really need to be able to store stuff on the user's computer. So the next time they come to the site, it's going to go faster. You know what? We gotta be able to read this stuff from the user's computer because we wrote it last time. So flash, you guys got to give us access to the person's computer. Oh. We need to be able to use more CPU and memory in order to do all of this stuff. So you had all of this feature creep added on, added on, added on without a real major revision to the security policies, and what we have now is something that's just horrifically insecure. It's kind of like Java it, you know, great language. I have a friend that works on the Java compiler and engine, and it's just evolved to the point where it's not that's useful. And it's very dangerous. In fact, iOS, which is Apple's operating system for iPads, and iPhones 10 years old now has never supported Adobe flash. [00:04:00] And as of the end of this year, Google's Chrome will no longer support it. Firefox doesn't support it anymore. So, you know, you're still using flash where you're a business. You better ditch it quick. Steve Fourni: How about other Adobe products? Like, I mean, we use Adobe audition for all of our audio and recording and editing and stuff. Are other Adobe products besides flash, just as dangerous or was it this sort of flash specific? Craig Peterson: [00:05:00] Really it's Flash specific. Adobe Audition is great. They've got video editors, of course, Photoshop. So many people use and variants of it. They just have the normal security problems that you might find in almost any software that's out there nowadays. Nothing's a hundred percent secure, but Flash is about 90% insecure. That's an overstatement, right? But with the new protocols, if you will, that are in place for the internet and called HTML five. This new programming language, your browser is actually an operating system unto itself. Anything you could do with flash and more, you can now do with it. Just the basics that are supported in every browser that's made today. So you're okay. Most of the rest of the Adobe software, but flash is something that you might not realize it, but you probably have not been using it for a year or more. And if you're an Apple iOS user, you've never used it. Steve Fourni: Yeah, that's interesting. We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. I know you've got quite a list here of stuff that to talk about at all, pretty relevant. especially now that we're working from homes, let's move on to VPNs, which we were, I mean, we all thought we're safe and we're all thought we're doing the right thing. And companies tell us to go home and use the two-factor authentication and do all this stuff. And now maybe it's still sort of vulnerable to, huh? Craig Peterson: [00:06:00]Yeah. I, if you attended my courses, cause I do all of these free classes and pieces of training and I'm doing more and more of them to try and help people out. But if you attended my training on VPN, you really is that in almost all cases, it makes you less secure, then not using a VPN. Well, there's, there's a lot of details here. And if someone has a question I'm more than glad to answer that question for them, they can just drop me an email and I'll definitely help them out. [00:07:00] But now we've got a warning from the national security agency, an agency that never, ever used to produce warnings to people. In fact, they liked to these bugs because they use them to break into. So, you know, governments and businesses that they wanted to spy on foreign businesses supposedly, but the agency, cybersecurity director over at the NSA, by the way, it was launched and put in place by President Trump who mandated that they start helping businesses as opposed to going after them. Just collecting all of our data. They said VPN gateways, in particular, are prone to network scanning brute force attacks, zero-day vulnerabilities. So the bottom line here is network administrators. Yeah, hopefully, you're listening closely right now. Make sure you have a strict traffic filtering rule to limit these people that are coming. I mean, in, on the VPN, right? What ports they can get to the protocols, they can use the IP addresses. They can reach within your network that is going out to these VPN devices because remember VPNs were designed to replace leased lines for businesses. So it connects one network to another network. So you've got somebody working at home. Who's using their home computer on their home network and is now VPNing into your business. You now [00:08:00] have piggybacked to their network onto your network. And so now, who knows what that 16, 18-year-old boys, been going to online, right? All of that data, all of that ransomware, all of that malware can now spread to your business network. So VPNs, huge, huge surety risk. And then those people who use them for home. Home users, get you going. You use these free VPN servers and services. You are actually being spied on even more by using those services than if you never used them in the first place. Steve Fourni: So what, so what are we supposed to, what are we supposed to do then? I mean, there's some, there's some stuff that I, I can't access from home without connecting to the VPN. Like I can't, I can't, you know, share a screen from my work computer from home without VPNing in. Craig Peterson: Yeah, man, again, I can't speak to your network. I'm not sure exactly what they've [00:09:00] done. Maybe they did everything right. Because it is possible to do this stuff. Right. But you cannot do it with even the prosumer technology. You got to get into the enterprise stuff. So, What do you do? Well, most of the time, what you should be looking at are screen applications. So for instance, you might be on your home computer and you might have a machine that you use at the office. So you could use something like log me in, which is a Massachusetts based company here Logmein.com. And so there's a client sitting on. Your computer at work that allows you to drive your work computer. As though you're sitting in front of it, anywhere in the world, it can be controlled and regulated, et cetera. But the idea here is now you don't have a VPN, the stuff that's on your computer at home, on your network, on the other computers at home. It's not going to cause problems at the [00:10:00] office. Bottom line. So using those types of things, like log me in there are many others out there is, is really where you'll see the wind here. Don't just knee jerk. Like so many businesses have done. Don't we're going to do another class on this. Steve, I've convinced myself because this is so important, but don't just do a knee jerk and put it in a VPN in place and say, okay, well, there you go. Now we're all set. Use some of these other services, Microsoft has something they used to call terminal services. Now the remote desktop, what we've done for a lot of clients, we do not expose remote desktop because there are all kinds of security problems with that again and again and again, but, basically, you can just have of a big server that could have 50,000, a hundred thousand people on it. Each has its own individual virtual machines that they can access from anywhere. [00:11:00] Again, getting rid of the need for these VPNs that more often than not according to the national security agency is misconfigured. Steve Fourni: Wow. That's very interesting. We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. And I did want to get to this one too because I do think that in some way, shape or form, we're going to have. Students learning at home, at, and again, I think there's this thought that, Oh, well we're just learning from home. Just go fire up the computer and have at it. but I mean, again, cybersecurity is going to be so big for not only the students that are at work but for. The teachers for the schools themselves, administrators, what, how are, what is the, I guess the dangers, and what are some of the things we need to focus on? If our kids are at home learning and keeping them safe from things like cyber-attacks and the like. Craig Peterson: I was one of the members of the technology committee for back to school for the state. And we came up with a number of guidelines, looking at this and schools have always had trouble with cybersecurity. And the biggest problem they have the budget. Right? It's somebody is [00:12:00] it person in the school district. Hey, here you go, you get to be the cybersecurity czars. So now they struggle. Yay. Come up to speed and get that title and maybe get an extra a dollar per week. And that's very, very difficult. So you're continually hearing about schools getting ransomware. You know on top of all of that, you've got these kids that are hacking in trying to do the Ferris Bueller thing and change their grades. So, you know, my heart goes out to these people just again and again, but there are a lot of shortcomings in this. They just don't have dedicated the funding. They don't have the skilled personnel to continuously vet and improve cybersecurity defenses. You know, when you look at businesses with a thousand employees, they are having to investigate more than 100 cybersecurity incidences a day with a thousand employees. Well, how about a thousand kids? So many of the schools are [00:13:00] saying, well, we'll just use the web, right? Because of the cloud, because the cloud is secure, which of course just isn't true at all. And this pandemic now, Yeah, it has amplified all of these risks and they're using VPNs in many cases, which makes things even worse than that haven't adequately secured data in the platforms. So the FBI has a warning out right now saying K to 12 institutions are vulnerable to cyber-attacks because of limited resources. Yeah. Dedicated to network defense. So we've, we've gotta be careful in the last 30 days alone, Steve we've had more than 4.7. Million malware, incidents in the education industry worldwide. [00:14:00] Wow. Almost 5 million. Yeah. And malware incidents in the last 30 days in school. This is really, really problem they're, ill-equipped, they're ill-trained and I don't know what the real answer to this is because we're. We're not putting the money into the schools and you know what, with all of this Cove and stuff, there's even less money, the schools are worried about making sure the kids can connect online, particularly in more rural areas because they just don't know. I have the bandwidth. They might not have the hardware at home is a nightmare that is coming down at us. Rolling full steam ahead. Steve Fourni: Well, very interesting Craig, somebody to keep an eye on and, people want more information. They can sign up for, the helpful service that you provide free of charge. All they have to do is text. my name Steve that's right. My name that's Steve, with a V to this number Craig Peterson: Eight-five five three eight five five 53. And if that doesn't work, you can just email me ME @craigpeterson.com. Steve Fourni: I love that, Craig. Thanks again for the time. Appreciate it. And, we'll get up with it with a Jim next week, but we appreciate the time and have a great day. Craig Peterson: Take care of Steve. Steve Fourni: Thank you. Take that, take it easy. There goes a Craig Peterson. Good stuff. We'll [00:15:00] have a final word. Craig Peterson: We're going to be kind of doing some of the sneaky stuff here. See how this works with some lives, with some video content and yes, Craig is finally getting into the more digital age and I'm definitely gonna do that VPN. Training again. In fact, I think I'll break it up into a few different pieces of training because I think a lot of people had trouble following some of it. Although we had 95% of the people stay from beginning to end for my VPN training. And that's pretty typical for all of my pieces of training, frankly. Keep an eye out for that because I will be doing that again soon. Go online. If you haven't already Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Take care, everybody. Talk to you later. Bye-bye. ---  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome, Good Monday morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Jack Heath this morning discussing the latest hacks that are hitting us all. Here we go with Jack. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com ---  Automated Machine Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Craig Peterson: So, what I do with my credit cards is I have it set up with apps on my phone from the actual banks. Be careful about that, especially if you're on Android, there's a lot of fake banking apps out there we have to worry about out there. And that's just a little bit about what we talked about this morning with Mr. Jack Heath. Jack Heath: Craig Peterson, our tech talk guy. How are you, Craig? Good morning. Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning. Finally, over that bug I had, whatever it was Flu or I am not sure what. Man, I missed you last week. Jack Heath: Have you been? What'd you have? What kind of a? Have you been sick? You've been tested? Craig Peterson: No, I haven't been tested. Yeah was just a general malaise, not feeling well, no energy. So who knows, right? But the list of COVID-19 symptoms covers almost everything under the sun. I [00:01:00] Jack Heath: You know they could check the box. Hey, I hope you feel better, Craig. I want to get right to it. I'd noticed. And we've noticed we had a friend that I'm with the credit union in New Hampshire. Recently, there are so many, I noticed a whole new batch of email scams that are coming to people's email servers and it says things like, and a stay with me. It's pretty clever. It will put in like the subject Craig Peterson, to someone who knows you. And all it says is like a name, you know, like Justin McIsaac click here, and there's a link. And then you look at them, a return email, and it's, not from Craig Peterson, but they somehow get a common name and they just send you an email with a link, making it look like it's from someone, you know, and don't open that link or what happened. Craig Peterson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. It really looks like right now, like the Russian hackers are on a big spree here when it comes to the emails and there was this group called like, Cosmic link. [00:02:00] And they've been getting more and more sophisticated to doing some of the things you just mentioned. What they're using to do this is basically 15 billion stolen, exposed credentials that are out there right now in the criminal markets. So they know a lot about you, they know websites that you've been to your usernames, your passwords. So we're using this also to try and extort money out of people saying, Oh, we caught on some bad websites and here's your user name? Here's your password. What this boils down to obviously be careful what you click on. But on the other side is that we're still using the same usernames and same passwords on all these different websites that are out there. They're able to trick us more and more. Now we've got the NSA warning us. That was something that started happening here again over the whole COVID thing is that many of us are working from home. We don't have the ability to just pop over to the IT people or ask someone else, Hey, Clara, did you get this email? [00:03:00] Does this look fishy to you? Many people are starting to click on stuff they never would have clicked on just a few months ago. Jack Heath: Yeah. And again, what happens if you do open one of those links? What happens? Craig Peterson: Well, what'll happen is typically they'll try and get you to enter in some login information. So they'll try and be something like an Amazon is a very, very big right now, but as a target by the threshing group. So it looks like it's a notice from Amazon saying that your, your subscription has expired, and you need a new credit card. So you'll go. Click on that link. It'll take you to a website that looks like Amazon and is asking you for new credit card information. So people go ahead and put it in because they don't want their stuff to expire. And before you know it, the bad guys have your credit card and they'll typically run it up to its credit limit within a day, Jack Heath: Within a day of just like random purchases before you get contacted from your bank or whatever credit union, you know, say, Hey, is this you in San Diego buying gas right now? Craig Peterson: Yeah, [00:04:00] exactly. So what I do with my credit cards is I have it set up with apps on my phone from the actual banks. Be careful about that, especially if you're on Android there's a lot of fake banking apps out there, but I have it set up so that if there are purchases that are more than $50, it immediately informs me. So I can say, okay, wait a minute. Something's going on? And now with the modern credit cards with the modern banking app, You can disable that credit card. So something else you might want to consider, and with visa cards, you can generate a one-time single-use credit card number and it can't take it. So who cares? Jack Heath: All right, Craig. Well, glad you feel better. We have to run. Craig Peterson.com  Thanks, Craig Craig Peterson: Those drive time shows. I noticed on my audio was a little, I think I overdrove the telephone. I have a new, A to D to A converter. [00:05:00] And, it is I not quite configured. Right. So I'm going to work on that a little bit, hopefully for tomorrow. Will sound a little bit better when it comes to .R. Polito. All right, everybody, take care. We are setting up our studio here for more and more content. So keep an eye out for that. We've been cleaning up our email lists. You might've gotten an email from me asking, why you haven't been opening my emails and we get some really good followup stuff too. For those people that do click through, I am really kind of excited about what we have in store for you. We're going to do a whole. On of training. We're going to be helping you guys out when it comes to even the hardware, we're going to help get you into some good prosumer hardware. We did that for a few people, already. This is from a much earlier this year and they, they kind of Guinea pigged it a little bit here with some new hardware from Cisco. And I am [00:06:00] happy to report that everybody is very happy with that as well. So everybody, take care and make sure you are on that email list. So you can find out about what I am doing when I'm doing it. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Take care of everybody. ---  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Message Input: Message #techtalk Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Good morning everybody! I was on with Matt this morning and we had a good discussion about Doom Scrolling and how it is affecting the mental health of people and society in general.  We also discussed Mark Zuckerberg's view on censorship on Facebook.  Let's get into my conversation with Matt on WGAN. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Craig Peterson: So we put on some more software because they had been using Malware Bytes, which is something I really like, but it's not a panacea. They switched over to the stuff that we had that we've been providing and we found a Chinese backdoor. Hey, good morning, everybody. I am planning on doing a show this weekend, even though it is on the 4th of July. So we'll see how it goes today. But that was me with Matt. This morning, doing voice impersonations as well, which I usually don't do. It was kind of fun. Anyhow, we covered, I think, three of the best topics of the week, Matt Gagnon: Seven 30, six WGAN morning news on Wednesday morning. It is 64 degrees in Portland, and we're joined now by Craig Peterson, our tech guru, who joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over the world of technology and the fascinating world it is. Is it not Craig? Craig Peterson: It is each end every Wednesday, as well as Saturdays at one. [00:01:00]Matt Gagnon: Now that also is radio professionalism. He's teasing and previewing. The fact that he has a show on Saturday at one. To make sure you hear it here on this fine station WGAN which you can listen to by telling your Alexa to listen to news radio WGAN at any time, any place anywhere for any reason. Now, Craig, I want to start at the bottom of the list that you sent me every Wednesday. There's usually a good nugget or two, and I'm going to start right at the bottom here today because there's a very interesting story that you had sent me about doom scrolling and how it's slowly eroding your mental health. It's screwing everyone up. [00:02:00] And I know that this is sort of tied to Coronavirus. But I gotta tell ya, several people that I know I'm not gonna name names or anything here, but, they, they do that like, and they have done that for years. It doesn't, it isn't just. It isn't just coronavirus, although that's certainly amplified it. Craig Peterson: Yeah, not to name names, but I have someone that I've been married to for. Matt Gagnon: Well, okay. You dimed out your wife. I'm going to do the same then because my, my wife and I constantly fight over things that she reads and, you know, she's trying to be an informed person and, you know, check out the world around her and stuff and it just emotionally manipulates her all the time. And then we get into the. You know, uncomfortable conversations about stuff like that. And it just, it, it becomes a problem, particularly with, you know, she's not terribly bad at it, but even if you're sitting there all day in the morning, and then in the evening before you go to bed and you're just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, and checking out all these things. [00:03:00] Craig Peterson: Well, then it didn't, didn't use to be so bad, man. You know what? It was bad enough. Right. But now what's all of the news about the news is about this old COVID-19 the worlds about to come to but it's been about all, you know, news consumption, generally speaking, you know, you see all the, just horrible things in the world and all the things that, you know, cause you emotional distress or whatever, and then you just can't stop and you get into a rabbit hole and your aunt. So tell me a little bit about doom scrolling and why an end. And if it's not COVID-19 it's the riots in the streets and really a lot of bad news out. There's still a lot. There's a lot of talk about this so much so that, as you mentioned here, there's a name for it, which is called doom scrolling and the signs of it includes, you know you're not only doing it to every spare minute, but you're not going to sleep at night. You're sitting there going through this reading again and again, and you end up in these what the New York times, Kevin Rose is calling a doom surfing or falling into deep morbid rabbit holes. Filled with coronavirus content. One of the things I thought we would get out of the internet, this was a long time ago was that you know, we, we would have this wonderful new town square where we could all talk and engage. Matt Gagnon: We had that for a time and now it's gone. [00:04:00] Craig Peterson: We did. Absolutely. And now what's happened is that the internet is figured out, Hey, wait a minute. Now we can make bucks off of you if we can keep your eyeballs on us. And what're some of the better ways to keep your eyeballs on it? And of course the doom and gloom or some of the things that can be very, very addictive. To all of us. And then you add in all of the psychology that the gaming community has helped over the years to keep you involved. It's so bad that there are people mostly in South Korea. Yeah. But so bad that people have died rather than eat or use the bathroom. Okay. Just to be able to play a game online. So we, we've gotta be very, very careful with this because it's a psychological cycle we're getting into right now. Matt Gagnon: That's going to be very hard to get out. Yeah. I mean, it's just, it's amazing how much of your life is lost with doing nothing? Just scrolling around looking and reading and things that only manipulate you emotionally and make you miserable all the time. And yet people can't stop doing it. It's, it's a fascinating, fascinating thing, that I've, I've noticed over the years. [00:05:00]And isn't it amazing Craig, anytime the power goes out or something, have you ever noticed this about, about yourself? I certainly have like, whatever you no longer have access to these things, your, your phone died. Cause he didn't charge it and all that kind of stuff. You know, you go to bed at like nine o'clock and it just doesn't sit there and preoccupy yourself with this stuff over and over again forever. And I think you're a happier person for it. Craig Peterson: I agree. And why would you need to just tune in to WGAN and you'll get all of the news you need. Matt Gagnon: Indeed. All right. Well, we're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru, who is joining us to talk about the world of technology as he always does. Craig, what is the average cost of a data breach? Craig Peterson: Oh, my gosh, this is something. Yeah. It's been going up and up except you about 20 bucks. I think now $20. Matt Gagnon: 20 bucks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [00:06:00] Craig Peterson: The latest statistics it's out there right now is showing that the average cost is 116 million. Dollars, which was just absolutely amazing. This is for companies publicly traded, even on the pink sheets, private companies, of course, don't have to really information. So we're not sure that those sites are criminals out there going after their usual targets, customer names, addresses, email addresses. And it's very, very costly because of all of the new regulations that are in place, but also because of what it does to your business. We're still seeing most businesses that get breached being out of business within six months. Matt Gagnon: Wow. Craig Peterson: What are we doing about it? You know, I, I have another client that we picked up here just about two weeks ago, and we put in some. More advanced malware software and you know me, right. I keep telling people that the stuff you buy from staples, the stuff Microsoft gives you just is not enough, right? [00:07:00] Norton. Ain't gonna cut it and et cetera, et cetera. So we put on some more software cause they had been using Malwarebytes, which is something I really like, but it's not a panacea. And they switched over to the stuff that we had that we've been providing. And we found a Chinese backdoor. And what that means is that the Chinese now had full access to everything on their network whenever. They wanted it. Now, this was, or is, I should say a contractor for the department of defense, a subcontractor for the department of defense. It's just, it's insane. What's going on out there? What does that cost them? What does it cost to the company when the Chinese now have access to all of your plans, all of your intellectual property or your production schedules, all of your clients, everything. That means they now can go into competition with you and producing your designs for the 10th of the price. [00:08:00] And it's all just because most of these companies aren't spending a little bit of time and a little bit of money just to save them this average of $160 million from a single data breach. They're not spending time and money to make sure their networks and systems are secured. And I'm very, very concerned because of what is been happening with working at home. And this is a trend. We talked about it, right? that these computers that are in our homes, home computers are not secure. And so a lot of businesses are yes. Well, we gave our employees all a laptop to take home and we use the VPN we're safe. That was me quoting. Matt Gagnon: That's an excellent voice [00:09:00] Craig Peterson: Yes thank you. In reality, what they just did was make their networks in the business, even less safe because so many VPNs allow the kids gaming computers and  who knows what that teenage boy is looking at online. All of those websites now have access through that VPN to your office. So it's, it's very expensive. Cybercriminals have tripled their game here in the last three months and we've got to be a lot more cautious going forward. Matt Gagnon: Really quickly. Craig, before you go, I did want to ask you one last question here and it's about what's going on with Facebook. And this, this boycott the advertiser boycott. That's going on, they're adapting, you know, a little bit and changing what they're doing with censorship on the platform as a result in response to that. Tell me what's happening. Craig Peterson: Yeah. We mentioned porous advertising earlier. Great ways to make money online. Well, Facebook, of course, makes money through advertising. And Matt did you notice I was praising Zuckerberg for this, but they're just about two weeks ago. He was saying, Hey, listen, we cannot be online being the arbitrator of who says what on the platform? [00:10:00] Matt Gagnon: Yeah. Craig Peterson: Did you? Matt Gagnon: I did. Craig Peterson: Okay. So one of those largest advertisers in the world, yeah. Unilever spends eight-point $2 billion, at least that's what they spent last year. So 8.2 billion annually joined Verizon the North face and Ben and Jerry's. Boycotting advertising on Facebook until these are going to be my words here. Okay. Boycotting advertising on Facebook until they started to censor the president. They're very upset that Facebook was not censoring conservative speech and they pulled their advertising. [00:11:00]Now. Thank goodness. Zuckerberg can be really Neely worded to be because he came out and said that Facebook would remove content. No matter if a politician or a government official says it. If we determine it may lead to violence or deprive people of the right to vote. So it doesn't look like he's going to be doing the types of things that Twitter has been doing, wherein George Orwellian fashion, they came up with a new term where it is so-called fact-checking that is not fact-checking looks like they're going to be blocking things that maybe deprive people of the right to vote or violence. But again, who's the decider here. Matt Gagnon: Yeah. Great question. And one that I'm sure you're going to answer on Saturday at one. When you are on this very station to go through these with more depth and detail, Craig Peterson our tech guru. We appreciate it as always. And we'll talk again next week, Sir. Craig Peterson:  Hey, take care. Thanks, Matt. Bye-bye. Matt Gagnon: You bet. All right, coming up next. [00:12:00]Craig Peterson: All right, everybody. So I am planning on doing a show, as I mentioned, make sure you are on my email list. So you find out about all of the free pieces of training, everything else I'm doing. Go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Take care. Everybody. I hope you have a  great independence day celebration, and maybe you had a decent Canada day celebration as well, if you're from the Great White North, eh? Take care, everybody. Bye-bye. ---  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Good morning, everybody. I was on with Jim Polito and we discussed Facebook's 180 on Censorship and Can police legally ask you to unlock your phone? Here we go with Jim. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com ---  Automated Machine Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah, I argued that it violated his fifth amendment rights, which is kind of did here. And the Supreme court sided with Hubble. Now let's move forward 20 years to today where we have smartphones and all of these laws about privacy. And of course, things like the fifth amendment are a lot older than our smartphone. This almost felt like an Abbott and Costello routine this morning. There there's is no good answer. When it comes to the laws right now on whether I think to enforce you to open your cell phones. Anyhow, that was me, Craig Peterson on with Mr. Jim Pollito this morning, covering central and Western mass. Here we go. Jim Polito: It is the Eve of Canada day. Canada day that that's like 4th of July in Canada, you know, Canada has copy everything we do joining us now, the [00:01:00] man formerly of Canada now of the United States, our good friend and tech talk guru. Craig Peterson. Good morning, Craig. Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning, Jim. Jim Polito: Craig, this is great to have you on a Canada day Eve, a very important day, very meaningful day for, Canadians like you. Yeah, but it's also meaningful to have you have, you want a day when we've got so much stuff in the news that relates to your area of expertise. And that's why I want to dive right into this whole Facebook thing. Which is, as the president would say is YUGE. Craig Peterson: Yeah, Jim Polito: I want to get into that. And then I want to talk about the police and the law, the privacy laws regarding my smartphone and having to unlock it under orders of police. But let's start with Facebook. Woof, Mark Zuckerberg, taking a hit financially. Huh. Craig Peterson: This is interesting. I had mentioned this to people here, by the way, for those that aren't aware of it, Canada didn't even have any sort of a Constitution until 1967.  [00:02:00] So they got a really nice socialist one up there. It's now illegal to offend someone in Canada. Jim Polito: Laughing Craig Peterson: Just in case you're wondering. Jim Polito: I know, it's crazy. Ah, it is. And who as, as, as a justice Scalia would say, who decides, you know, his question always is who decides, so who decides what's offensive and what's not, that's what I want to know. Exactly. And if someone tells you that you must call them the Royal Highness, the toilet throne, you must do that. Craig Peterson: Or you will go to jail. But anyways, next, Peterson, by the way, Professor in Toronto is just, he's amazing. But anyway, back to this Facebook, I was talking with my wife, [00:03:00] not more than two weeks ago, about how I was shocked and impressed by what Mark Zuckerberg was doing. You see your head, everybody out. It's out there. Right? Twitter was running around. Google was running around and they were all, Oh my gosh, the president's tweets here. We need somebody that hates something to quote fact check him. Again, a redefinition of a word, right. It's just so 1984, where fact-checking doesn't mean that they're checking the fact. Fact-checking means that they're checking to see whether or not it meets left-wing dogma and here we had Mark Zuckerberg there saying, "Hey, listen, I'm not going to do this." We need to have free speech. We need to have open forums. We need everyone to understand what's going on. And then this happened. We had a bunch of left-wing companies. Now, now remember this. Okay. All of these major tech companies are [00:04:00] extremely left-wing and I'm talking about left-wing by the American standard. In other words, they're very, very socialist in what they want to do and how they want to do it. Many of them are Marxists. You know, they're, they're hard over there. But, what we're seeing is all of a sudden, all of these companies decided that. You know, free speech is not a good thing. Very a very Marxist tendency. You've talked about it before and the very fascist, which is the same thing. People don't understand. There are two sides of the same coin, but they had over a hundred different advertisers, including the North face, Ben and Jerry's and Verizon. Boycotting advertising on Facebook because Facebook would not censor people who had a speech that was maybe libertarian or conservative, or frankly, anything the President might say. Jim Polito: Yeah. Right. You got to [00:05:00] censor him. Anything that comes out of his mouth. You've got a censor. Craig Peterson: Yeah, exactly. So you look at the biggest advertisers in the world. You know, Unilever is one of the biggest ones and they spent eight-point $2 billion on marketing last year. And Unilever said, Hey, we're stopping advertising on Facebook until you start. I'm not paraphrasing here. I'm just interpreting. We're going to stop advertising on Facebook. That eight-point $2 billion. None of us. Can I go to Facebook until you stop the president from speaking freely and Facebook shares closed down 8.3%? Jim Polito: And that's big. I mean, even, well, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, it's not like he's a, he's going to have to buy from the dollar menu for the rest of the year. You know, he lost billions in value and his value. But, the point is he's kind of doing the right thing by saying, I'm not going to censor it, [00:06:00] unfortunately in this free market, you know, that comes with a cost. Craig Peterson: Yeah it really does. Jim Polito: With all the "Woke" corporations. Craig Peterson: Oh, my gosh. It's so true. Now his statement was that Facebook would remove content, no matter if a politician or government official says it. If we determine it may lead to violence or deprive people of the right to vote. So his statement was rather narrow. And that gives me a little bit of hope here that maybe he has kind of turned a bit of a corner. Now, there is another social media platform out there that I'm on called parlay or Parler, and it is a direct competitor of Twitter and has been. Have you seen the numbers over the last week? 1.1, or excuse me, my Parler had about 1 million people on its platform a little more than a week ago. It now has one and a half [00:07:00] million people on it. Half a million people that have left Twitter and gone to Parler because of this sort of thing that's happening. And Parler is saying, Hey, listen here we're like all conservative voices now on Parler. And the CEO, founder of Parler has offered $20,000 reward for a left-wing shul to move over to Parler and followers from Twitter. Jim Polito: Yeah. you know, I joined it because I knew about it and I finally decided to join it, and get my name on it. So I could have the name, Jim Pollito, like I do on all the other platforms. And, I I've just started looking at it. I haven't done, put it, put out any posts on it yet, but I have watched it. But if you go to the mainstream media now, they'll tell you that parler is, Is, is racist, antisemitic, whatever. They'll tell you that it's a home for racism and antisemitism. And that's just the mainstream media is saying, [00:08:00] Hey, we don't like somebody coming up. And being a conservative, we don't like that. They won't admit that they've got Marxists, Leninists, fascists, you know, operating on their platforms, but they'll point right at this little upstart and say, Oh, it's antisemitic. Craig Peterson: Yeah, absolutely. You know, and we'll see what happens. And when the filtering really starts happening over there at Facebook, but it's, this is going to be a problem. So, Hey, look, let's talk about the cops and forcing the unlocked phones here, Jim. Do you remember Webster Hubbell? He's getting pulled into this too. Web Hubbell, isn't Web Hubbell dead now, too. I thought he passed. He was part of the whole whitewater deal? And he had a mouth like a, he actually looked to me like a large mouth bass with all, you know, apologies to large mouth basses. Jim Polito: He had a really big mouth. Web Hubbell. He was a strange-looking guy. Craig Peterson: He really was. Well, there was a 2000 Supreme court opinion in the prosecution of Webb Hubbell, who was a Bill Clinton associate gotten snared whitewater investigation.  [00:09:00]  You're absolutely right. And prosecutors asked Hubbell to produce documents in 11 broad categories. And what did they do? They come through the documents, Hubbell provided and they found evidence to charge him with mail, fraud, and tax evasion. It sounds kind of familiar doesn't it that they are doing it again. Jim Polito: Yes, it does. Craig Peterson: That violated his fifth amendment rights, which it kinda did here and the Supreme court. Sided with Hubbell. Now let's move forward 20 years to today where we have smartphones and all of these laws about privacy. And of course, things like the fifth amendment are a lot older than our smartphones. And we've got courts now, Indiana Supreme court [00:10:00] rule that the fifth amendment allows a woman accused of stalking to refuse to unlock her phone. We've got other cases out there like in Philadelphia, a man was released from jail after four years. I've been held in contempt in connection with a child pornography case. Cause he wouldn't unlock it. The federal appeals court rejected his argument that the fifth amendment gave him the right to refuse to unlock it. A Vermont federal court reached the same conclusion as did our Colorado courts, Virginia state court. And. The Massachusetts Supreme judicial court in 2014. In other words, kind of, depending on what the police know, they can order you to unlock your phone. And there's a great analogy. Yeah. ARS Technica used. Let's say you have documents that are stored in a wall safe. [00:11:00] You may know those documents may belong to you. They may not belong to you. You may know, or not know what's in the safe and you may know, or not know the combination to the safe. So the bottom line is if the government cannot show that the suspect knows the combination, then the courts unanimously agree that forcing the suspect to try to open it would be unconstitutional because of the act of opening the safe functions as an admission. That the suspect owns the safe and the documents inside of it. Okay. So that's step number one. But if the government can show the suspect knows both passwords and which documents are in this safe, that's not protected because what the courts have been saying is the fifth amendment is a right against self-incriminating testimony, not the production of an incriminating document. Jim Polito: Right? Craig Peterson: States are split on this whole [00:12:00] thing right now. you know, there's one theory that holds the opening of the safe is a testimonial. Once it's open, it has whatever it contains, right? This is a confusing world right now. Jim Polito:  Right? Craig Peterson: And of course the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court basically says. Yeah, we can force you to open that if we know it's yours and we know that, you know, what's in that device. And we'll see what happens here going forward because it's easy enough now with these phones that unlocked themselves with just seeing your face. They don't have to force your thumb to a thumbprint reader. They just have to point the phone at your face. That's really going to throw that wrench into this because yeah, it's just taking a picture. Jim Polito: So let's just say it's uncharted territory, frankly, because. In [00:13:00] Massachusetts, you're saying the Supreme judicial court is saying, yeah, if you know, what's in there, like if it's a safe and you know, what's in there, you have to allow us, you have to open it for us. Craig Peterson: Yeah, you're absolutely right. It gets very, very complicated. Jim Polito: And that's not that's right. That's not standing on the street corner and the cop walks up, suspects you of a crime, and says open up that phone. It's once you're in the judicial system and it's a court that says you have to open up that phone. Yeah, because the court believes that you do have this information in your safe, in your phone, the police officers have a reasonable cause action you know, what's on that phone and we want access to it. So this is getting more complicated by the day. And I only play a lawyer on TV, not the radio. So we'll kind [00:14:00] of have to leave it to that. It's getting more confusing all of the time. All right. Let's folks the way that they can get more information from you as these issues unfold. you text my name, Jim, to this number. Craig Peterson: Eight five-five, three eight, five 55 53. Just text Jim to eight-five five three eight five 55 53. And if you have trouble with that, you can always just email me M e@pcraigpeterson.com. Jim Polito: Craig peterson.com and of course, standard data and text rates apply. My name Craig, an excellent segment, happy Canada Day and we'll catch up with you next week. Craig Peterson: All right, take care. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye. Alright, don't go anywhere. Final word. When we return, you're listening to the Jim Polito show your safe space.   ---  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Good morning, everybody. I was on with Steve Forni who was sitting in for the vacationing Jim Polito. We discussed voting methods (electronic, mail-in, and via an app), Anti-virus and cutting the cord.  Here we go with Steve. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com ---  Automated Machine Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Craig Peterson: Think of what happened in 2004 with hanging chads, you had a Republican, you had a Democrat, you had various attorneys at each table who were examining the ballots. At least they had ballots to examine. Well, Mr. Polito was out for the week. So Steve Fourni and I got into a number of different topics.  I also found out his name is actually not French. It's Italian. So I guess I just mispronounced it again. Steve Fourni: All right. Yeah. We'll get back to the show. Steve Fourni here in for Jim Polito this morning. Every week at this hour we're joined by Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. Good morning, Craig. How are you, sir? Craig Peterson:  Hey, good morning, Steve. Yeah, I sent you a couple emails over the last couple of weeks and never heard back from you. Busy times over there. Were you like vacationing last week or something? Steve Fourni: No. Although I did see that you, that you tried to send to, Stefan Ford, the EA, Oh, that must be my French, my French Canadian, cousin,  [00:01:00] I'll have to dig. I'll tell you when I lived up in Northern Vermont, every place I'd go out on the lawn, like Forney they're like, Oh, F O U R N I E R. I'm like, no, no, I Italian Forni, Forni. Hey, Craig can we talk about, I know you do have a list of things we want to talk about, but I've been talking about the voting, the mail, and voting, and I don't understand why we can. pick our winner of American idol via our cell phones, but we can't pick the next President via our cell phones.  What are some of the maybe concerns that you would have if we were to go to electronic voting? Craig Peterson: Well, I heard Bayback trying to straighten you out on this morning. So I, hopefully, this isn't a lost cause, but here's the problem. When we're talking about American idol voting and putting in more votes for their winner, then the President gets. It's just such a difference. From saying it, who cares if somebody wins American Idol or not. In fact, they even [00:02:00] admit that they allow you to vote 10 times when we're talking about the President of the United States or Congress critters, et cetera, we really do want to have a reasonable accounting of what's happened and what's happening. So we let's start with a mail-in ballot. How do we know the mail-in ballots are legitimate? We, we already had an arrest a week and a half ago from somebody that printed up ballots themselves and sent them in. Now it's obviously what we're talking about here. This person was indeed caught, but the problem you have with the mail-in ballots is they. Personally, I think it was a guy is an idiot, but if China or Russia really wanted to influence our campaigns or our elections, I should say, well, how better to do it than to inject thousands of fake ballots. But even then we don't need [00:03:00] thousands,  look at the election for Senate that happened up in New Hampshire a few years ago. Kelly Ayotte lost by literally a hand full of votes. That's where you can really topple an election and to having some extra votes in your hip pocket there that you can throw in at the last minute that aren't necessarily trackable. Is a problem. So how about trackable? Oh, if you're going to be able to track these votes, you now have to identify the person that sent in the ballot. And in some States, they even have different colored envelopes for these mail-in ballots. So the clerk, when they receive the ballot can automatically, let's see, we've got one Republican, one Democrat, one, two Republican two Democrat to one, right. And start throwing away ballots based on their colors. Or there are others that say, well, let's put a bar code on it so that we know it's a legitimate [00:04:00] ballot. All right. So the barcode let's say has a checksum on it, or it's actually registered in the database as something that was sent to a person and an individual home. So we now know that this is John Bayback's vote. And even though he may not care how you vote, Steve people might care how John votes, and we can now take John's and throw it away or know exactly how John voted and use it for extortion. Or all we need to do is hack the computer that has the database throw in a few thousand extra ballots that weren't legitimate or reverse engineer the software. When we get into what let's vote via an app, let's do the American idol thing. Well now, the flood gates for fraud are completely wide open. The flood Gates for fraud have already been shown to be, to be wide open in the testing that's been done. [00:05:00] We've talked before on my show about some of them, some of these applications that were looked at by third parties, these applications are that they were trying to sell to various States and, and even look what happened with the DNC, with their electronic voting. Out in Iowa for the primaries, the whole thing could fall apart very, very quickly. And there's no way to have a real audit of what happened. It's not like you've got a card. And you filled in the blank. So the little circles and you handed it to the machine that counted it. And now we're questioning, wait a minute. Why this machine gets so many votes, this doesn't seem right. Or we spot check a machine. We can go grab those original ballots and. If worst came to worse, we can have an army of people counting them. Think of what happened in 2000 in Florida with a hanging CHADS, you had a Republican, you had a Democrat, you had various attorneys [00:06:00] at each table who were examining the ballots. At least they had ballots to examine. None of that can be true here. And that's what gets me concerned. Steve. Steve Fourni: Well it's fair enough. I mean, you were the guy to ask, so I, if anybody's going to, you know, poopoo the idea, it'd be you. That's fine with me I suppose. But, no, but it's insightful. And I mean, I, you know, again, I know, I know it's so much easier obviously to just do the American Idol thing, but even like, it's funny when I log on, if I want to log into, see my VPN at home, I have to go through all these steps and I have to send a notification to my phone to verify and. You know, I have all these channels that I have to go through in order to have some sort of security. And I didn't know if there's anything we could do, but I wish we were ahead of places like Russia and China, but I guess we're not, we're not technologically, Craig Peterson: We are ahead. In Russia and China, your vote doesn't count. At least in the US, we're trying to make your vote count, right? You get 99.8% voting for the guy or gal that's at the head. [00:07:00] Yes. It probably wasn't a legitimate vote. Right. And it's much easier if you want to be a socialist country to just have an electronic ballot where. There's no way to tell that all of these virtual ballot boxes were stuffed boxes. So this is not an easy problem to solve the technology can't solve it. And I, I am for 100%, those heavy papers with very little felt pen where you fill in the oval a hundred percent for those. Steve Fourni: Interesting. All right. Fair enough. We're talking with Craig Peterson our tech talk guru. And I'm moving off from that. one of the things you want to talk about was antivirus software, which I think we all get the ads for the free ones from companies we've probably never heard of. And the best thing to do really is to just pay for them. But, but what are some of the processes that we should take, and how do we sort of know which ones to choose? [00:08:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah, that's a difficult position, right? To be in nowadays. It's like a submarine. You have to have multiple compartments and having some of this antivirus software on your computer will. The fight with each other. So you've gotta be a little bit careful. So let me just tell you what I think people should probably be looking at. you mentioned paying for them versus the free version. Absolutely. You get more flexibility. You get more good stuff and ease of use and support and a little bit of a better cover for business. As long as you're not a regulated business, you can just use the basic stuff, but here's what I recommend people do. If you're using windows and you cannot change to something more secure, then here's, there's the basics use, Microsoft windows defender. It comes with Microsoft windows, make sure that you have that properly enabled and brought up [00:09:00] a date. The second thing to do turn on automatic updates. If you have professional versions of windows, you can tell it to wait a week before it installs them. I absolutely advise you to wait a week because Microsoft is well known to mess up these things and cause problems on your computer. Okay. Then. As third party software, it goes right now. I am recommending people use Bitdefender for their antivirus. Plus it works on windows. It also works on Mac. It's 30 bucks. It's very, very cheap that's per year. if you are a regulated industry, then you've got to get into the professional software and you should be expecting to pay about $50 a month per computer in order to help keep them safe. That's my.advice.  Bit defender, the windows software, avoid Kaspersky, like the plague. It is right up there with these other Chinese companies.  [00:10:00] In this case, it's Russian and we just don't know how good it is. The Norton three 60. I'm not a fan of and trend micro. I have avast, I'm not a fan of any of those. They are not great. And none of the antivirus software, except for. To varying degrees, except for a bit defender, none of the antivirus software actually protects you from modern threats. So be very careful out there. Everybody, the bad guys are up to their activities up over 300%. They really are coming for us, but pay at least to pay the bit defender guys. And if there's something else you've been using for the last 20, 30 years, while maybe you should pay for that too. Steve Fourni: We're talking with the good stuff we're talking with.  and, just one other thing that you had in here that I thought it was important to get to is somebody who would love to cut the cable. But I also don't want to have to describe the 15 different things. it looks like YouTube TV just got a little bit more expensive, but it also looks like it suddenly got more options now, too. Right? [00:11:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah, it did. They've added CBS, Viacom, the family of cable TV networks, but here's what we're talking about, YouTube, which initially was free. Right? Hey, I get 30 days free. It's wonderful. You get all your local TV, et cetera. It is now $65 a month for the service. So compare that to what your basic cable used to cost you. Okay. It's we're at the point. Now, if you want to get your Disney plus you want to get YouTube for instance for television. Maybe you want HBO or Showtime or some of these others, Netflix, because they've all got their own original series. Now about the Peacock, NBCs is coming out soon. It is way more expensive than cable. So yeah, there you go. Higher prices, basically all the way around. Steve Fourni: That's disappointing. I mean, I'd like to do something and again, I am, you know, I'm paying for Disney plus I think my Hulu comes through my Spotify. [00:12:00] Like that's part of the issue I'm having is it's also, it's, it's all just, so confusing. I, you know, if all I want to watch is jeopardy and sports and let my wife get her trash TV, I should find a cheaper way to do it, but it's, and then it always changes Netflix every month I add this, take this away. And it's like, you never know what you're paying for. I guess. Craig Peterson: Yeah. Yeah, that's absolutely true. It's very, very frustrating. I don't know if it's going to get much better. You know, I remember when cable TV was first introduced really back in the early eighties and how frustrating it was, then you had to buy packages and you couldn't Ala cart. Now, what is this today? 40 years later. And we've still got these same problems. Steve Fourni: And then, of course, I think to myself, well, what if all these companies just got together and made one platform? Well, then they would be Comcast. Craig Peterson: Yeah. Well, there's the opposite is happening. You know, we Disney just pulled all of their Marvel stuff from other networks. [00:13:00] So it's, it's getting even more divided than it was before I think unless you can get it through your cable company at a reasonable. Price is going to just keep adding up. Cause you're talking 10, $15 a month for each one of these premium services. And then on top of it, there's 65 that YouTube wants to charge you or there's Sling. There are dish networks. Those satellite service providers are getting nailed A T and T the losing subscribers like crazy, but it's, unfortunately, Steve, it's just not clear yet. Steve Fourni: Yeah, that's a, it's interesting. Well, something to follow, Craig, we appreciate the time again, if you want information like this from Craig, all kinds of good stuff. you can, text, well, I guess you could text my name right Steve to this number Craig Peterson: (855) 385-5553. So just text Steve to (855) [00:14:00] 385-5553, or send an email to me. ME@craigpeterson.com. Steve Fourni: That is the best email address in the world. me@craigpeterson.com. You can't, can't screw that one. I probably can't hack it either a certain even try Craig Peterson. Thanks for the time today. We appreciate it and we'll catch up next week. Craig Peterson: Take care, Steve. Bye-bye. ---  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! In this segment, Craig tells you about how police hacked a criminal network and why we are seeing a resurgence of ransomware. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: 7 reasons to pay for antivirus software and skip the free versions YouTube TV jumps 30% in price effective immediately Police roll up crime networks in Europe after infiltrating popular encrypted chat app New Mac ransomware is even more sinister than it appears Ransomware is now your biggest online security nightmare. And it's about to get worse Apple's Silicon Macs promise screaming performance TikTok and 32 other iOS apps still snoop your sensitive clipboard data An embattled group of leakers picks up the WikiLeaks mantle --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Hey, have you been using EncroChat to make sure your communications are secure? It's only thousands of dollars a year and bad guys have been using it. Well, they've been using it until now. the Europeans caught them. They had this thing called operation and it was being run by various police agencies. it's been reported now by major local news outlets. Motherboard has an interesting article about it as well. I have a tech crunch article about it up on my website, but the police secretly took over. Encrochat now was something that was designed to be very, very safe, right? A private communication tool for you to use anywhere in the world [00:01:00] and the way they made this stuff private is they also included the hardware. So the idea here is kind of similar to another company that I've liked over the, over the years.  It's Silent Circle. They have something called the black phone and in the Silent circle's case, they're using an Android device, which makes me a little bit nervous, but it is being run by some of the best cryptographers in the world. And with Silent circle and the black phone, you, you buy their phone and you can send messages back and forth, and it keeps your teams connected and secure. They have an app that works on any Android or iOS device now instead of just having to have the physical device, but they still have the physical device, I believe. Let me see. Let me get on there. Yeah. Silent phone. There you go. Silent [00:02:00] phone deliver secure enterprise. Ready? Silent world, silent manager, or actually that looks like the silent phone is their new product, which is kind of interesting. They've obviously changed their tune a little bit out there. Anyhow. In order to be truly safe. You need new hardware, at least that's the thinking. And the looks like a Silent circle's changed their tune a little bit. I use. Something in order to keep me and my messages safe. We use WebEx teams internally with our own encryption keys, and that's really quite secured meets military-grade encryption, which we have to do because we provide services to military contracts. Cheers. This stuff rolls downhill, right? So if we're providing a service to a DOD subcontractor, we have to be compliant with those regulations as well. So we are, and [00:03:00] then there are some other apps that you can use that are pretty darn good. that worked quite well. Things like WhatsApp, et cetera. But in this case, back to our story here, this was a network that was being used by. Organized crime and the police apparently were able to monitor a hundred million encrypted messages. Sent through this network called Encrochat  and they were discussing drug deals, murders, extortion, plots. Okay. Kind of everything. and I love this article and vice it starts out saying something wasn't right. Starting earlier this year, please kept arresting associates of Mark, a U K-based, alleged drug dealer. Mark took the security of his operation seriously with the gang using code names to discuss business on custom encrypted phones made by a company called Encrochat and for legal reasons, they're referring to Mark [00:04:00] as the pseudonym. Okay. But it goes on and on because the messages are encrypted on the devices themselves. Please couldn't tap the group's phones or intercept messages as authority normally would I still want to encourage chat criminal spoke openly negotiated the deals. In detail and priceless name to customers, explicit references to the drugs they were selling and how much, et cetera, and a motherboard. This is such a great article, but in the same timeframe, police across the UK in Europe started busting these criminals. And in mid-June, they picked up, the alleged member of another drug gang and then millions of dollars worth of illegal drugs were seized in Amsterdam. Hmm, what's going on? Well, it turns out that the messages weren't really secure, these guys were paying thousands of dollars a year to have these security devices and to have secure messaging. [00:05:00] But turns out that, due to this mass hacking operation run by the police, they'd been quietly reading these users' communications for months, and then investigators shared the messages with agencies all around. Europe. It's just an amazing scale. It's amazing what they were able to do. It's amazing that the Encrochat people obviously didn't have any real professionals, security people building this stuff, but, man, good for them. Some of the information and receptive by authorities showed how deeply law enforcement seems to have breached to the alleged criminal organizations. It's just going on and on. The Netherlands, and what they were able to do there pill mill and covered by law enforcement. They were doing this, this goes on for pages. They got all of this great video and then Encrochat  [00:06:00] device here. They've got a YouTube video showing all of it. So if you're interested in this, check it out because it just really, I think reinforces the concept that you're not. Safe online with your communications, no matter what you have to be very, very careful. And if you're using something like WhatsApp, great for you, glad you are. I use what's an app with my, my mastermind, one of my mastermind teams that I'm on. I really enjoy using it. It's simple. It's easy to use. So that's something you might want to look at. And then the other one I use is signal it's called signal S-I-G-N -A-L. Hey, if you want to get information like this from me on a weekly basis, or sometimes even more. Make sure you are on my email list. Just go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Go there right now, before you forget, and [00:07:00] you'll be getting this stuff. People who are already on my list knew about these things, how to communicate. Privately and securely, even when we're talking about a family gathering. You don't want to run it through China on Zoom. Really? You don't. Okay. So how do you do all of that? No, you know, we talked about that in some of my pieces of training and in some of my newsletters. So I'll make sure you go there. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. And if you have any questions. Make sure you ask, just send me an email. M E@craigpeterson.com. So let's get into ransomware because it is once again, your biggest online security nightmare. You thought the nightmare was over three years ago? No, no, no, no. It is back. And it's back with a vengeance, great article on ZDNet this week. There are so [00:08:00] many IoT devices we're connecting to our enterprise networks. It is getting more and more dangerous. IOT of course is the internet of things. These are things like your lights, your. Oh, everything, right? I just saw a thing or an article talking about major hacks going on with some of these network attacks, attached storage devices, these NAS devices that we're putting on that you might think are more or less commercial when they are not. So this is rapidly ransomware shaping up to be the defining online security issue of the era, frankly. It's a very simple idea. It is so easy to execute right now with increasing sophistication by criminal groups. It has gotten to the point where you can hire a company that writes ransomware and gives you technical support on it. Some of them will even [00:09:00] just go ahead and take a percentage of the money that you get for the ransoms and you don't have to do anything. So the ransomware group gives you the software. Gives you all of the services. If somebody gets the ransomware, they're contacting the ransomware group, they're sending the Bitcoin to the ransomware group. The ransomware group is taking their money off the top and sending you the bad guy. The Bitcoin. So we're going to talk about that even more. When we get back, stick around, you're listening to Craig Peterson and online. Make sure you subscribe right now. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Stick around. We're going to be right back. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! In this segment, Craig explains what the best type of Anti-Virus to use is and why.  For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: 7 reasons to pay for antivirus software and skip the free versions YouTube TV jumps 30% in price effective immediately Police roll up crime networks in Europe after infiltrating popular encrypted chat app New Mac ransomware is even more sinister than it appears Ransomware is now your biggest online security nightmare. And it's about to get worse Apple's Silicon Macs promise screaming performance TikTok and 32 other iOS apps still snoop your sensitive clipboard data An embattled group of leakers picks up the WikiLeaks mantle --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Well, there is a lot of antivirus software available up there for free but, should you be using it? Hi everybody. This is Craig Peterson. We're going to talk right now a little bit about the antivirus software that is out there. What I think you should be using in order to help keep yourself safe enough online. There is no such thing as totally safe. Is there? But we'll give you. Actual names, places you can go, things you can do. We also talk a little bit today about YouTube and police roll up some crime networks over there in Europe. This new Mac ransomware is even more sinister than it appears. We'll talk a little bit about ransomware in general as well. Hey, I want you guys to take a couple of minutes right now. If you would make sure you sign up for my email list. Go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. I've got some really cool [00:01:00] things for you there. Once you subscribe, I have like three or four different things, and I got a lot of comments on them over the last couple of weeks, we put them up. One of them is a security reboot guide, and it has been so popular. Hey, listen, let's start again with your security. Let's reboot. This stuff it's become so popular. I think what we may do is turn this into a kind of a post-COVID-19 little thing. Maybe even have a course on it. So we'll be doing that as well, but you'll get that. If you subscribe Craig peterson.com/subscribe. So please do that. I'm not going to just send you all kinds of crap. I send good stuff. Believe me. We have people that have been on my email list now for decades. So it's good stuff. All right. Then the let's get into the good stuff right now. And that has to do with all of this antivirus software. You know, our friends over at Microsoft have come [00:02:00] up with their own antivirus software if you will. Who knows the whole windows environment better than Microsoft. Well, that's how the thinking goes. Microsoft has even released versions of it's kind of antivirus software for Linux. If you can believe it. I don't, I'm having a hard time with that, but I guess they have to because now they're including Linux as part of windows. Now, if that's not a tacit admission that you need Linux, I don't know what. Is Linux is really great for a lot of people and a lot of things, but it is kind of difficult to use. I have a friend who uses Linux and has for probably 20 plus years. Now, he listened to what I had to say way back then started exploring Linux. He's an insurance adjuster, Pat, and he had tried to figure out what's the best one. What should I use coming from a windows environment? I had helped them with solving some insurance problems. Some [00:03:00] insurance claims against some windows machines where some of the data had been mangled badly and then I wrote some, some code from scratch in the Unix world. In fact, Linux extracted all of this stuff. You know, there was a doctor who had was a plastic surgeon. He had all of these photos of all of the patients and that he had inadvertently when he was messing around with all these photos. Change the name of every photo to be exactly the same. So they had no idea who the photos were of when they were taken. They had nothing. So I wrote some code that went into the photos and, and, went in and looked around and found good data and made it so they could recover those photos for those people that had to have the plastic surgery. So Pat said to me, Craig, How can I be secure, now? This was some years ago, as I said, probably two decades ago. I said, well, there's no way to be [00:04:00] completely secure in the online space, Pat, but I can tell you one thing, windows is not the place to be. If you are looking at security. That is still the case today. If you're truly a security researcher, you are going to be using a VR version of Linux. A lot of people that just need to go online, who just need to access basic websites are using these Google Chrome devices, which are absolutely fantastic little devices. Now they don't meet all of the regulatory compliance issues that. You might have if you are in some sort of a regulated space as a business. I definitely don't like them in the school environment because Google has been caught taking the information about our students and selling it and sharing it. So, you know, I'm not a big Google fan and that's part of the reason why. But if you are a security guy and you want [00:05:00] something that doesn't really store much locally, that gets updated all of the time. Then the Chromebook is not a bad option and they use that now. And what's the Chromebook based on, of course, it has a Linux kernel underneath it. And Linux was designed to be secure before there was Linux. There were various versions of Unix, BSD being one of the big ones, A T and T, UNIX system three, system five, all of which I've had experience with over the years, man, it's been awhile are the predecessors of it. That's how the internet was designed. And the BSD, this Berkeley software distribution of Unix that comes from way back when the and threes and just earlier's it. How that. It was really designed to keep students out of the systems to provide the very first networking that ever there was. There was some of the very first, there was actually some of the machines that were before [00:06:00] these Unix machines, but it is absolutely fantastic. But, Pat figured out how to use Linux. And he was very determined. He managed to do it. I don't think it's for everybody. Dell does now offer Linux pre-installed on some of their laptop lines. So if you're interested in Linux and you like Dell and Dell is what we typically recommend nowadays. Be careful when we're talking about Dell because there's the consumer stuff and then there's the enterprise stuff, right? There is a difference between the two. But when we're talking about these Dell laptops that have Linux pre-installed, they are kept up to date. They do get their patches. Now Microsoft has had anti-virus for some of these versions of Linux, but you might want to try them out. Try out either a Chromebook or try out a Linux laptop, or even a desktop. I tend to use Mac. Because, unless it's a server function, in which [00:07:00] case I use a version of Unix, either BSD, derivative, like open BSD, which is one of the more secure versions of Unix out there. Or I use free BSD, or I use Ubuntu or Red Hat. I tend to use Red Hat a lot, but I use those for servers. I don't use those for desktop. So back into the antivirus software realm, Where you really, really need antivirus software is on your Windows computer. There are antivirus software packages that are available for all kinds of other platforms for your Android devices, which again are not terribly secure. We've talked about that before. I'm not going to talk about it right now and you could use it on some other platforms as well. Kaspersky has some for Linux. And as I mentioned, Microsoft does now too, but you really, really, really gotta be careful on Windows. It's attacked more than anything else. It is so common and it was so poorly [00:08:00] designed that it has all kinds of nasty holes all over the place. So the first piece of advice here, when we're talking about keeping your Windows computer safe, Is to use Windows defender. That sounds pretty straightforward. Does it? A lot of people use Windows defender. It's pretty solid. Make sure you've got it turned on. Cause it is on by default, but make sure it's turned on and make sure it's getting updated. So that's number one. Now we get into the third party software very, very quickly here. Now antivirus software is useless. A hundred percent against the most modern of attacks. So antivirus software will work for some of the old stuff. Now some of the old stuff still floating around out there and people are still getting nailed because they have not applied the patches to Windows and to all of the other programs that they have sitting [00:09:00] on that Windows machine. So yeah, your antivirus software could do you some good, but frankly, you shouldn't need it cause you should be all patched up. But. What I think you should get. And again, this is not a hundred percent and now things are a hundred percent, but go ahead and get Malwarebytes Malwarebytes, and put it on your Windows PC. It is a good idea also to put it on to your Macintosh computers, Malwarebytes. We tend to use something beyond Malwarebytes is called AMP, which is the anti-malware prevention software from Cisco. It's very good. I don't think you can buy it retail. I think you have to buy it through a reseller like me, but there are plenty of resellers out there. So if you can afford it, put AMP on your computer. But if not, get a paid version of Malwarebytes because you're going to get a little bit better [00:10:00] coverage for businesses. You're going to get some on-call support. It's going to be easier to use. You get some anti-phishing stuff, some extra banking security. Some of them include password managers and you know how important I keep telling everybody how important password managers are. I prefer by far 1password. That's what it's called the digit one password in order to keep all of my accounts safe in the online world, online space because one password just requires you to remember one really good password. Everything else is stored in a vault on the computer and you, you can't get much better than the way one password does it. We also use a third party, something called DUO. but you know, that's more advanced stuff that we're not going to get into right now. So. AMP I like number one, number two, Malwarebytes. Both of those are paid. [00:11:00] You can get free versions of Malwarebytes by the way. Although if you can afford it, go ahead and buy it. And it's going to provide protection for the whole family. Sometimes these things are really rather cheap. I'm surprised at how little Malwarebytes costs, but it isn't like the best thing in the world. And Bitdefender, absolutely Bitdefender is the other one to look at. Okay. Bitdefender, Hey, I'm out of time for right now. We're going to be back. So stick around you listening to Craig Peterson here on WGAN and I'm on every Wednesday morning at seven 30. Two with Mr. Matt during the drive time show, stick around. We're going to finish this list. When we get back, visit me online. Craig Peterson.com. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Craig discusses the uptick in Ransomware and Phishing. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: 7 reasons to pay for antivirus software and skip the free versions YouTube TV jumps 30% in price effective immediately Police roll up crime networks in Europe after infiltrating popular encrypted chat app New Mac ransomware is even more sinister than it appears Ransomware is now your biggest online security nightmare. And it's about to get worse Apple's Silicon Macs promise screaming performance TikTok and 32 other iOS apps still snoop your sensitive clipboard data An embattled group of leakers picks up the WikiLeaks mantle --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: 00:00:00] Hey, did you think WannaCry was the end, the final blow of ransomware. A couple of years back turns out it is back with a vengeance and I mean, vengeance. You are listening to Craig Peterson. Of course, you'll find me online @craigpeterson.com. You'll find my podcasts. There you'll be able to subscribe to my email list. You'll be able to see some of the training stuff that I'm starting to do right now. You'll get announcements about Lives when I'm doing training. So you can decide what makes sense for you in your move forward. Whether you're a career security person or maybe security is just yet another hat that you have to wear, right? If you're a business owner, it's one of a hundred hats you have to wear. Well, we try and have it all there for you. So, there's a good path to follow. I had a really interesting discussion this last week [00:01:00] because of a friend of mine. In fact, she's in one of my mastermind groups, she was saying that one of her best friends has been trying to learn about security and couldn't find any real courses on it. And the OpenCourseWare stuff is from 2014, which is in, you know, by today's standards very outdated and not of a whole lot of use because as I mentioned things like antivirus totally useless in this day and age. Okay. So, there are so many things that we have to worry about and what I'm going to be doing more training on this stuff, but there's only one way to find out that is to be on my list. So, let's get back into this. Cause this is just fascinating about ransomware. It was kind of a menace mainly for consumers. Back in the day, I had a couple of my clients that were hit with WannaCry. It never went anywhere inside their networks. It never encrypted – [00:02:00] anything, at least the divisions I was covering. The other divisions all got nailed. All got nailed very, very badly by the WannaCry ransomware. And they, I have one client who is a worldwide, a fortune 10 or 50 anyways, very, very big company. And they refuse to follow my advice corporate-wide. They did follow that my advice and one of their divisions and that division didn't get nailed with ransomware. So, I'm pretty proud of that right now. All of the rest of them had to shut down all operations for a couple of weeks. Now with this whole COVID-19 shutdown, you know what that can do to a company. Very, very difficult. In fact, to this day, the division that we've been protecting is the only profitable division in the entire corporation, just absolutely amazing. So, the bad guys now [00:03:00] realize they didn't have to steal data to make money. Like they used to do. All they had to do was make it almost impossible to access encrypting it. Unless we pay up. So there are some new twists now. Not only are they not just going after consumers, but they're also going after businesses, including large businesses. Like for instance, the client I just mentioned, which is a huge company, many municipalities you probably heard about Atlanta. Got nailed with it. Like three times. They, everything went down, they lost everything. They couldn't collect taxes, even water payments, nothing. Oh, you know, they should have hired me. Right. They hire these huge corporations that have no idea what they're doing. Right. They send out these kids that just graduated, paying them almost nothing with sleeping bags underneath the desks. That's a good way to tell, by the way, if you hired a good company, do they have sleeping bags under their desk? We're seeing [00:04:00] now that they are also getting on to our computers. And usually, within about two weeks, they start what's called a lateral spread. So, they start to go from the one computer that they've compromised to other computers within the organization. So, they'll get on to the, you know, the CFO's computer, which we just found in one of our clients, a couple of weeks ago, that DOD contractor again, where they were using Malwarebytes, which is, as I said, pretty good. They had some other antivirus software, but that computer, the CFO's computer ended up getting compromised and it had a back door and active back the back door on the computer. That's a huge deal, especially for the CFO, especially for a military subcontractor, just amazing the data that they [00:05:00] were able to steal off of that computer. They only found out because their Malwarebytes contract had expired. They said, Hey, you've been hounded us in us to put this AMP on it. So, let's put AMP on it. This whole anti-malware platform and a stack of software and you know, what the heck. It’s a lot more expensive, but let's try it out. So, we tried it out and bam right away. On the first day, we found that as well as a number of other problems on their network. So, they'll spread laterally as they did in this organization here. This was just like a week or two ago. And that lateral spread is access to more data and then they will pull data off of the computers. So, there's another reason to monitor all of the outbound flow of data, which we do automatically for all of our mid-tier and above customers, where we're watching all of the outflows, right? The exfiltration of [00:06:00] data, where's it going? What's it doing? Is this normal? Is this normal for this time of day? Is this normal for this machine? Is this normal for this type of data? We do that all automatically. If we notice something. Oh, we have another client that we saw. That there was some data exfiltration going on to Mexico, which was not normal. Was not something expected? So, the systems automatically shut it down, set off our pagers. We had a look and indeed somebody had gotten into their network through a portion of the network. We did not control. So, we were able to catch that. Thank goodness. They were able to get a few gigabytes of data out versus the entire file server. Right. Very, very big deal. So that's one way that the bad guys are doing it right now. They take your data and then they try and ransom it to you now. Yeah, they may encrypt all of your data. And part of the reason they do that is just to get you on your [00:07:00] toes. So, you realize, Oh my gosh, somebody has been in here. But the other reason they do that is so that they can come back to you and say, Hey, we have all of your customer's information. We have all of your intellectual property. If you don't pay us, we are going to post this up on the internet. Usually, they'll post it on the dark web. So the bad guys have full access to it. Many times they will sell it and make a few extra bucks off of it. So, you know, you can pay them or the other bad guys can pay them. So we get, we've got to be careful about all of this. There are a lot of ransomware attacks going on right now. These groups are smart and sophisticated about half of the companies pay the ransoms. So these bad guys are frankly, very well funded. They are skilled and you've got to have the right type of stuff. You've got to have the firepower firewalls. [00:08:00] You've got to have the stuff that's constantly monitoring them. So you're looking for in intrusion detection systems and intrusion prevention systems, which the Cisco firepower stuff provides, but you have to be able to monitor it. You have to have special, not just rules in place, but rules to watch the logs and everything. Okay. they also, by the way, the bad guys now are searching out encrypting any backups that organizations are leaving connected to the network. So think about that hard drive, you have connected to your computer that has all of this data on it. And the bad guys will see that backup data and encrypted as well. So if you, if your only backup is something attached to your computer, It ain't going to help much in the event of ransomware. In fact, it's not going to help at all. So make sure at the very least you disconnect it when you're not backing up and that you back up every day or [00:09:00] follow the training that I gave on backups, do a three, two, one backup, and that is going to keep you safe. Okay. by the way, the police departments, the FBI, et cetera. They are not going to do much follow up on any of this type of stuff. Any of this ransomware, if it happens to you. And I've had so many listeners contact me M E @craigpeterson.com asking what do they do and how do they report it to the police and how do they get it escalated? Cause the police don't seem to be doing anything. Okay. So be, be very careful out there, frankly. There's also some new ransomware that's out there for Macintoshes. Now you have to be a complete idiot for this ransomware to take, hold on your Mac, because it is going to pop up on your Mac multiple times asking you, Hey, do you really want to install this? [00:10:00] This is from an unidentified developer. So, again, be careful when you are downloading software. It's, you know, my, one of my mantras, if you are grabbing software from an unknown source online, Be extra, extra careful, even if it is properly signed with an Apple ID, all that's going to happen is it gives Apple the opportunity to trace back where it came from, who might've been the developer behind it. So this is real ransomware. It's called theft quest. It's got all kinds of menacing features, but it's very unlikely to infect your Mac anytime soon unless you're in the habit of downloading pirated embedded software. Cause what they're doing is they are packing this in with software on some of these BitTorrent sites. So, so, yeah, it's a little bit of a problem, right? [00:11:00] So yeah, first of all, you're getting there from a torrent site, which is probably questionable. Now there are legitimate torrent sites. I use them as well for downloading things like versions of, of, Linux, et cetera, et cetera. So there are legitimate sites out there, but there are many that are illegitimate. So be careful. That's how you get nailed on a Mac. So we are going to be disappearing from most of these stations. And I appreciate you being with me today. If you miss part of today's show, or you'd like to hear the rest of it, just spend a minute here and go to Craig peterson.com/itunes or go to your favorite podcast program and right there do a search for Craig Peterson, but you know what? It's even easier if you use iHeart or tune-in or iTunes, just go to Craig peterson.com/. For instance, slash  Iheart, slash tune-in. It'll take you right to my [00:12:00] podcast and please consider subscribing because that really helps the numbers, which helps me to know that there are people listening. And if you are listening, drop me a note. Let me know what you like about the show and some of the changes that have been underway and some of the changes that are coming up. Drop me a note as well. Craig peterson.com. Everybody, take care. And stick around or we'll talk next week. Bye-bye. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! In this segment, Craig continues his discussion of Anti-Virus and explains why it will cost you more if you cut the cord on cable tv. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: 7 reasons to pay for antivirus software and skip the free versions YouTube TV jumps 30% in price effective immediately Police roll up crime networks in Europe after infiltrating popular encrypted chat app New Mac ransomware is even more sinister than it appears Ransomware is now your biggest online security nightmare. And it's about to get worse Apple's Silicon Macs promise screaming performance TikTok and 32 other iOS apps still snoop your sensitive clipboard data An embattled group of leakers picks up the WikiLeaks mantle --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Well, we covered some of the very first things you need to do to keep your computer secure. Now we're going to get into what I think is going to help stop the ransomware. You are listening to Craig Peterson. Thanks for joining us. We are talking about your computer right now. Your computer security. There are many reasons. To pay for antivirus. In fact, that was in my newsletter this week, seven reasons to pay for Anti-virus, very worthwhile. And we had just mentioned Bitdefender antivirus plus 2020. So that's another one to consider putting on. So you've got Malwarebytes. You have your Bitdefender. I'm not gonna mention the names of the other ones that I don't want you to use, because that is going to confuse you, right? But there's one more thing that you should put on that. Again, you should get a [00:01:00] paid version of it's important to get the paid versions of some of these things because you get better support, you get better software, you get more features and that helps the company stay in business. And. Frankly, if they're not in business, they're not going to be able to support you very well. Are they the last piece that you need to put on? There is something called open DNS. Now I did a webinar or actually a couple of webinars about open DNS. You will find it online. It just opendns.com. My company mainstream has the commercial enterprise versions that we use for our customers. However, if you go to opendns.com, you'll see, there is a consumer tab and a consumer. Button. So they have DNS services for your home or small business. If you are a home user and [00:02:00] you have a family, the open DNS family shield is a really great way to go. It is simple. You couldn't get more simple than this. It doesn't have any configuration options. It's not like the enterprise version where we can do all kinds of specific restrictions, but it is going to be very, very handy for you. Okay. So, it just goes to opendns.com click on the consumer. And they'll look at Familyshield and it helps to stop your kids, your self, even from getting those websites that you really don't want to go to. Okay. Then they have open DNS home. This is a little bit more open. Then Familyshield is, but they do want you to have an account with them. So I don't have a problem with that, frankly. I know Cisco, I trust Cisco. My company [00:03:00] mainstream uses Cisco. We sell Cisco. Okay. So I trust it. So you can enter in all of your information there and it's going to help with some of the website's loading faster, open DNS is much higher. Time than most of the ISP is out there for their DNS services. So many times when you think the internet down, or it's not really down, or it's just that there's no name resolution working because you're, you're a internet service provider. They're DNS is busted, so it'll, it'll fix a lot of those things for you. They have over 30 million customers, by the way, OpenDNS. Now, this is what I mentioned at the very end of the last segment. Is going to help with the ransomware because most of the time, the ransomware calls home. So what it's doing is setting itself up to do the bidding of the bad guys out there. And your [00:04:00] computer becomes part of a botnet, or at least a remote control net. And then they start poking around looking through what's going on, looking through what you're doing and becomes a problem. Now, remember I said, you should get the paid versions. Well, they have open DNS home, VIP, which is $20 a year. And then they have a small business prosumer version, which is $20 a user. I believe that is per month. I am not absolutely positive about that. I think it is cause that's I know that's what we charge for the professional version is $20 per user per month, but you'll see all of that. So if you tie all of these things together, your windows defender. And you add the malware bytes to that, because again, windows defender, isn't going to catch absolutely everything. [00:05:00] So you have to be careful about what you have on your computer Bitdefender and openDNS. You are going to be safe against far more than 90% of the attacks out there. And if you're a home user, this is going to be good enough. If you are in a regulated industry, like your defense subcontractor, you have medical information. In other words, even if you have employees and you have the employee's information for health care, et cetera, be very careful because this is not good enough. You could get yourself in a whole lot of trouble. Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson. You can find me online@craigpeterson.com. This week's articles you would have received if you were subscribed to my email list. So make sure you subscribe right now. You'll find out about it. All of the training and I'm going to be starting to do probably every other day pieces of training coming up soon that [00:06:00] you can watch it at your convenience. I'll probably be doing a lot of them live so you can ask questions live, and I'll be telling me about those as well, but you have to sign up Craig peterson.com/. Subscribe. Well, let's move on to our next topic here, by the way, if you have questions about any of what we just talked about or what we're about to talk about, just email me M E@craigpeterson.com. Be more than glad to get back to you. If you've been looking for a way to save money on your cable bill, most of us have, of course, and many of us have kinda cut the cable. You know what? I haven't cut the cable. I've got my cable set up so that it only gives me the channels I want. I'm not paying for extra channels. I don't care about sports. So I don't have any of these sports packages, which tend to be a huge part of the cost of cable. [00:07:00] Well, many people have used some of the other services that are out there. And, you know, what we're talking about really here is cable TV over the internet. And what are the platforms out there? Sling is one of them I've had Sling on the show before you've got FUBO or BTV I've had on my show before as well. But there's a, been a number of cord-cutting options over the years and things that'll help you do to really get what you want. Okay. But when you start adding these up, they get very expensive, very, very quickly. And I am looking right now at an article talking about what our friends at YouTube have done. If you've been on YouTube over the last six months, you've seen these ads that keep popping up that remind you, Hey, you YouTube. We have cable TV, try it free for 30 days. And [00:08:00] many people jumped right on that. Existing customers have been paying $50 a month for basic cable TV. Now, remember YouTube is not getting you the internet. You still have to have the internet. So you're probably paying a cable company to give you the internet. You might be using a lead telephone company using DSL or something like that, which is, you know, limited juice. good for you. Isn't that wonderful? But now brand new customers can expect to pay $65 a month for you tubes live cable, TV, alternative. And those people that already have it take a look at your July bill because the price jumps from 50 to $65,  it's a lot of money when you get right down to it. [00:09:00] I love this article here by ARS Technica. And he wrote an article titled YouTube TV ads, channels, and raises prices. And you can't opt-out of either change. So the price started at $40. Then it went to $50. Now it's at $65. and it's even worse if you are using A T and T. So there you go so much for that stick around. When we come back, I'm going to tell you a little bit about the five G alternatives that are coming when it comes to cable TV. And we have even more to talk about here. As pleased in Europe are closing down a crime gang, interesting stuff. Your listening to Craig Peterson, stick around. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! In this segment, Craig continues his discussion of Microsoft Teams and other collaboration platforms. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: 7 reasons to pay for antivirus software and skip the free versions YouTube TV jumps 30% in price effective immediately Police roll up crime networks in Europe after infiltrating popular encrypted chat app New Mac ransomware is even more sinister than it appears Ransomware is now your biggest online security nightmare. And it's about to get worse Apple's Silicon Macs promise screaming performance TikTok and 32 other iOS apps still snoop your sensitive clipboard data An embattled group of leakers picks up the WikiLeaks mantle --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] We're going to finish up our discussion about Microsoft teams. What are some of the things you might want to use it for? What is this? How was it different from Zoom and everything else on the market? So let's get going. hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for being with us today. I really appreciate all your comments to me ME@craigpeterson.com. A lot of people just respond to my weekly show notes. You get those by signing up for my email list to find out what's going on, what you should be doing, what free trainings we have, what paid courses there are. We are coming out with a free again, free, free, free. I'm trying to help out here. It really is for you. Okay. A free, special report about all of these apps we're talking about [00:01:00] today. So Karen's been working really hard on that with me, and we hope to have it out either this week or maybe the week after. And it's going to be pretty detailed about some of the pros and cons when you should be using it, what policies should you have in place for your employees when it comes to these collaboration apps? So I think it's a very important topic. You know, so many of us just knee jerk our way into this with the COVID-19 thing, and we needed something now, please, anything. And we knee-jerked into zoom. Most of us, some of us started using Slack. All of these things are up in usage. In fact, WebEx had so many people applying for it because it's really the only one, if you're a business, that you should be using. That they had to cut back. They were giving it away for free for like two or three months. Even though they have a huge worldwide [00:02:00] infrastructure, they still had some problems with the onboarding, getting everybody set up and ready. So there may or may not be free WebEx stuff going on right now. They're supposed to go through the end of June until the end of July. I'm not sure what it is right now, but anyway, We're talking about Microsoft teams right now. Okay. so as I mentioned at the very end with Microsoft teams, you need to integrate your Skype went and we already know Skype is not considered to be overly secure. It was actually a little more secure before Microsoft bought it. Then Microsoft changed its entire architecture to one where it goes through Microsoft servers. That way, if you're in China, Microsoft can censor you. Or if the law enforcement agencies in the US want to hear what you're saying, Microsoft can provide it to them. They couldn't do it before. So yeah. A little bit of resentment there. You [00:03:00] probably noticed in my voice, right, Anyhow, back to Microsoft here. The second big thing is it has this integration that a lot of people are looking for with your business apps. So you can use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, One Note. Planners, Sharepoint, one-drive. All integrated with Microsoft teams. And that is a huge win because all of that stuff is right there. Now the integration isn't as clean or as neat or as easy as maybe it should be. But it is there and it will get better over time. You can still use all of those tools, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, et cetera, et cetera, with pretty much any of these apps. They're all designed to be integrated to varying degrees. Microsoft ultimately will win this battle because they own the source code, right. They own the programs. They're going to take care of themselves first and they've been [00:04:00] sued about that before. So no news there. The next point, customized workspace, and every team is different. So Microsoft teams is customizable so that you can integrate it with third-party apps, as well as Microsoft apps. You know, that's really the trend right now. I see that across all of the industries, Cisco has done an interesting thing, and that is a couple of years ago. They decided to do a policy called API first. Now Microsoft is not doing this, but the whole idea behind API first is. That unlike Microsoft that tries to play everything close to the chest and give itself advantages over all of its competitors. We've seen suits on that forever, like integrating Internet Explorer, right into the kernels, supposedly. And so that you could not use other browsers. You always had to have IE initially, and then they allowed other [00:05:00] browsers, but you still had to have IE and then the courts ruled against them yet again. So unlike Microsoft's approach to try and lock you in, Cisco has decided that they want to make all of the Cisco software use the same interfaces that third-party vendors have to use. That is phenomenal when it comes to integration. So if you want to use WebEx or WebEx teams or any component of any of the Cisco stuff, including their firewalls and the routers, et cetera, et cetera, you can. They've got APIs for everything. Cause that's the only way they can access their own software. It's just absolutely phenomenal. So Microsoft teams do have some third party integration available on it, which can be handy. You also get real-time communications, which as I mentioned can be a problem. This isn't just true with [00:06:00] Microsoft. This is true for WebEx teams and Slack and everything else out there. But it's real-time. So a smart person's going to do something different with the email you typically try and delay, right? I try and read my email once a day and that's it.  If someone really needs to get ahold of me, but they probably know how to really get ahold of me. Right. So I'm not getting interrupted. I can work on the stuff I need to get to work on.  I'm putting stuff together for my lives, for my webinars, for my radio show for everything else. If I get interrupted, particularly if I'm doing some programming work, it can cost me hours of time. So I put off email and only go through it maybe once a day. Sometimes I'll go two or three days without really paying attention to my email. So I apologize to you. If you send me an email and you're hoping [00:07:00] for a quick answer, I don't always get back to you very quickly. Right. I have other people in my team that that's what it's for. So when we're talking about communicating in real-time with some of these collaboration apps, it's a double-edge sword. So instead of having emails, bouncing back and forth, which might take hours and hours, right? Because someone says something and half an hour later, another person reads it and responds. Now, then that first person an hour later read to them response, you can just have it go over very quickly. It's phenomenal for productivity. When you need quick productivity, the high priority initiatives that you have can really move a lot faster because it's not an email. It's not getting a push back while you were waiting. This is really instant messaging. Think of it like texting, right? So everybody can be on the same page with these teams apps you can see who has seen your [00:08:00] messages and people can respond to them. They can start a thread. normally how does it work? You're well, you might send an email to everybody. Giving them an update, right? They reply to you, but maybe not to everybody that happens all of the time. I know people that I, you know, I expect them to copy all because I, you know, I've got two or three people on it that are need to know, and they don't, they just reply directly to me. with these types of teams, apps, everybody's on the same page. Everybody can see everything. This conversation with email can split into a bunch of different conversations with ideas, being directed at one person when it really should be a group discussion. So keep that in mind as well. When you're considering some of these team's applications, everybody knows what's going on, what the status is, and productivity. Just keeps flowing. You're listening to Craig Peterson. [00:09:00] Appreciate you being with me today. And of course, you can get me online as well. Craig peterson.com. Make sure you sign up to my email list. Craigpeterson.com/subscribe. And that gets you an email every week. Oftentimes it's Saturday mornings. Lately, it's been more like Mondays, you know, summertime, COVID-19, every excuse in the book, right. As to why it's been a little bit more delayed, but you know, expected by Monday. And it's got my summary for the week. It's got links to my podcast and also info about classes and courses and lives when they happen. And then of course, here on the air. Take care, everybody. We'll be right back, stick around. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Craig discusses why you should use WebEx Teams over other collaboration platforms. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: 7 reasons to pay for antivirus software and skip the free versions YouTube TV jumps 30% in price effective immediately Police roll up crime networks in Europe after infiltrating popular encrypted chat app New Mac ransomware is even more sinister than it appears Ransomware is now your biggest online security nightmare. And it's about to get worse Apple's Silicon Macs promise screaming performance TikTok and 32 other iOS apps still snoop your sensitive clipboard data An embattled group of leakers picks up the WikiLeaks mantle --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Well, we've talked about GoToMeeting. We've talked about zoom. We've talked about Microsoft teams. Now it's time to talk about my favorite. How should you be collaborating in your business? Maybe your organization, your agency there's really. Only one solution and I'll tell you why. Hey, welcome back everybody. Craig, Peterson here. We have had quite a week this week and it's been quite a year, right? It's a Jumanji season. I don't know if you ever saw that movie, but I think somebody playing. Jumanji was set here in New Hampshire. The latest Jumanji movie out is actually pretty good. I watched it with the grandkids.  I quite enjoyed it. There are some issues with it and yeah, you have to just ignore you, ignore those things. but anyway, that's me. Right? So we've been talking about online [00:01:00] collaboration tools. Now, if you're like most of us and you had to have some people working from home. So even if you're a business that was considered essential. And you had people who were in the office all day, maybe your accounting people worked from home. Maybe if you had to deal with an attorney, it was remotely. It was from home. And how did you do that? We've been going into businesses lately that have been having troubles and having a look at this very question, how did they do it? And I think really it boiled down to one of two products that people were using. One of them. Was the Microsoft team's product. And I was actually quite surprised to see the number of companies that were using the Cisco WebEx teams. I was surprised because I didn't know that many people [00:02:00] really knew about it. How many people knew about WebEx teams? It was a frankly, it was a surprise to me. But WebEx teams is the only product out there right now that is fully compliant with the federal government requirements. So that includes things like DFARS, fed ramp, et cetera. Microsoft is promising that they will be compliant sometime in July, but at this point, they're not compliant. So if you have HIPAA regulations that you have to follow, or you have DFARS,  ITAR, or any of these other federal government requirements, there's only one option. And that's WebEx teams. Now, oftentimes when there is a government mandate to use something it's terrible. Right? How many times have you had that? [00:03:00] You have to get her driver's license in order to drive on the road, not only in your state but another state. So that. Is a terrible experience, right? Going to the DMV, trying to get that all taken care of. It's not something I look forward to, but you get even into worse spots. I remember doing some work for the US Navy. As a subcontractor and all of the hoops who had to jump through all of the things that we had to do. And that was a few years back. Now, we're doing work with government subcontractors that are doing work for the US  Navy. And I thought after these years, things would be a lot tighter. And in fact, they are. In fact, the new regulations, the CMMC regulations are much tighter with way more teeth on them. People will be going to jail. We're talking about [00:04:00] huge multi multimillion-dollar fines. Even for a small company. So it is a very bad thing here to mess up on some of these regulations. So I've been surprised when I go in and find them using things like Microsoft teams, heaven forbid they've been using Zoom, which they have been. And they are a federal government subcontractor, in fact, for the DOD department of defense. Because again, what did we talk about? Then, all those stuff routers through China. And China isn't just looking for military information. China is looking for information from our companies that they can use to compete against us. Our designs so that they can use they're selling it to their allies. The same thing is happening over North Korea. An article came out just this week, that North Korea has 7,000 highly [00:05:00] trained hackers. That is aiming directly at our businesses here in the US in order to cause economic harm, but also those hackers to gain access to potential military information. So think about that. Think about how bad all of that stuff is. Companies just don't understand what they should be using. So yeah, you had an excuse during COVID to not use something that's secure. I do get that. Believe me, don't know that the government regulators are going to be happy with you. You may go to jail, but. I understand it. So for instance, for the HIPAA requirement, those were loosened because of COVID-19 the federal government said, Hey, listen, if you're a doctor in one state, you don't have to get licensed in another state in order to do the telemedicine stuff. That made just a ton of sense. And they also, because of that loosened some of the HIPAA regulations, which they pretty much had to do. Right. Cause they didn't loosen the [00:06:00] HIPAA regulations. You couldn't do the Teladoc across state lines. And you sure as heck could not do Teladoc using zoom. So they just loosened it all up, but that's not going to last. All right. So start paying more attention to some of this. And some of these Teladoc things have their own platforms. You're a doctor, you get paid per whatever it is, hour or patient, whatever it might be. And you're not worried about the platform. And you're probably okay. If that platform is not secure in just speaking in general terms. Because you don't know anything about it, but some of these telemedicine companies that have these apps, et cetera, should be anyways, that gets into WebEx teams here. Some of the advantages that have made it the most popular web conferencing solution today. Number one, it's a software as a service. You just have to subscribe to the surface, you have internet access [ 00:07:00] and you're ready to go. WebEx teams are also one of the oldest out there that you can use. And I think that's really kind of cool when you get right down to it. And remember I mentioned a little bit early. that, it was the GoTo meeting was one of the older ones that were out there. You might remember some of the ads I do from WebEx, that it has been around a long time. But WebEx was founded in 1995. It really is the grandpa out there. It has been doing this meeting software for a long time. So it works everywhere. You, unlike zoom, you do not have to have a desktop app to do pretty much everything or anything that you might want to do on WebEx, which is a very big advantage. You don't have to have a download your audience. Doesn't need to be a subscriber to watch and listen. Which is not true for some of these other products that we've talked about today. [00:08:00] It also, I think it very, very successfully combined your online viewing with the ability to teleconference easily. And you can connect to the webinar via just the webinars access code. You can have passwords and whatever you might want to do. And this lets of presenters know who is actually there during the presentation. You don't have to have a time consuming, roll call or anything else. It's right there. You have. Also, of course, the chats, you have the questions and answers and you can have automatically in this space, a meeting, just take place as scheduled one or just ad hoc. So let's say you have a space in WebEx teams, that's for the team to discuss some part of some project. And so you're going back and forth, back and forth. I said, okay, look, let's just hop on right now. You, you just hit the button, the meet button, and Poof up in it comes. You're now in a meeting and people can call in on the [00:09:00] phone. They can connect via their smart device. Anybody that's in the room's going to get notified that there's a meeting on right now can go from your desktop. It is phenomenal. Just a simple click is all it takes. Then anybody who's in the meeting can present. You can use a built-in whiteboard, it can take remote control of your computer. Are you kidding me? Why would anyone not use this? And it's using the military-grade encryption that we were talking about earlier, right? The exact opposite of what zoom has been using it also. It allows you to do what we do ourselves and what we do for our government subcontractors. And that is we host the encryption key for all of the meetings and all of the communications. So the only way anyone can see any of this stuff that was in a meeting is to have this encryption key. [00:10:00] It's absolutely phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal. You also have your own site. So for instance, my company has a site at, you know, company named.webex.com. If you want to meet with me again, it's just. Company name.webex.com/meat slash. Craig Tada, you are done. They've got tons of training articles for subscribers to use. It uses a proprietary network that has nodes all over the world. It's reliable. It's secure. It is absolutely amazing. You have to use it. You have to try it. And I advise people to use WebEx over anything else for almost anything. All right. You and you can have conferences. For instance, my room allows up to 10,000 people into it, 10,000. You know, where else can you get that? But you don't have to have that big a room if you don't need it. It is just phenomenal [00:11:00] to share files, videos, chat back and forth. Multiple spaces are what WebEx calls them. Ad hoc meetings, conferences. It is the tool to use. And you can find out a lot more by just going to webex.com. If you would like a demo, you can just get one right there. You know, I'm not going to make a dime off of it. Okay. It's not like I own WebEx or own any stock in it. Cause I don't, but it is the way to go. And if you'd like me to help you with it, well, that's a different story. You can get help from me about almost anything we talked about here on the show. You can just email me. ME at Craig peterson.com and we help people out every day. It doesn't have to do with WebEx. Doesn't have to do with anything that you're buying from me. I just make myself on my team available. We have an offer going where we had 20 companies that we [00:12:00] selected from people that applied, that we provided an hour of tech support for anything they wanted. So that went really well. We've done that before. We may be doing the. The whole cyber health assessment thing. Again, we'll see how that goes. We did those for free about a year ago. So we may do that as part of our security summer this year, but the only way you find out about all of this stuff is to be on my regular emails, my weekly emails. And you do that. By going to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Make sure you're on that list. You'll get my weekly show notes and you'll find out about all of the extra free stuff and services that we provide. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Craig discusses Zoom and the security drawbacks it poses to businesses. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: 7 reasons to pay for antivirus software and skip the free versions YouTube TV jumps 30% in price effective immediately Police roll up crime networks in Europe after infiltrating popular encrypted chat app New Mac ransomware is even more sinister than it appears Ransomware is now your biggest online security nightmare. And it's about to get worse Apple's Silicon Macs promise screaming performance TikTok and 32 other iOS apps still snoop your sensitive clipboard data An embattled group of leakers picks up the WikiLeaks mantle --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] We've talked about, Go To Meeting, Microsoft Teams. We've mentioned the WebEx teams. We've mentioned Zoom. Now we're going to start delving into that even more. We're going to be talking right now about Zoom, the pros, and cons. It's probably the one you've been using. How do I know it's probably the one you've been using because that's kind of been the default. Zoom has a lot of advantages and some serious disadvantages as well. So we'll talk a little bit about those, but the number one problem that we've had with Zoom over, frankly, the years has been security and lies. Did you know that Zoom has misrepresented so many times about their ability to encrypt what they're doing and where they're routing? It is been, [00:01:00] it's just been crazy what these guys have been up to. It is not end-to-end encrypted. Let's just start with that, which means that anybody who is potentially in the middle which is by the way, Zoom itself. Is somebody who can listen in on the conversation. Now, remember what I said about Zoom and their developers, many of them. At least I think it might be most of them, they're in China. We had a big story that I don't think I ever really talked about on the radio here, but it had to do with China and Zoom routing people's phone calls to China. Which was absolutely a huge thing, then Zoom had excuses for it. Well, you know, we have data centers all over the world. We try and run them back and forth. Oh, okay. Yeah, exactly. I absolutely get it. There are articles online, have a look at the intercept, for instance, [00:02:00] they are generating their encryption keys in China for Zoom. That's absolutely incredible. Zoom has also just in the last week or so been exposed. They have been cutting off some of the Zoom user's meetings because China objected. China didn't want some of these people who were talking about China and some of the bad things China has been doing. In reality, we haven't been talking about these anywhere near enough here in the United States, but Zoom has capitulated to the Chinese government, the socialists over there. It's absolutely amazing what has it been going on? They're using some old versions of encryption that have been easily hacked. They've got the worst type of AES keys out there. The  researchers have confirmed that they're [00:03:00] using 128-bit keys for their communications. In other words, even the encryption that they have, which is extremely limited, is extremely poor. It's just amazing. They keep saying, Oh, you know, we're fixing it. Or we have fixed it. They keep getting caught in what the media has been calling lies again and again. These encryption keys in China and routing the data through China and capitulating to what China wants them to do. I don't know about you, but to me, that's a very, very big concern, right. These guys just have not been upfront and honest with people. It's a terrible situation. So Zoom is something I absolutely would never. Use for anything that really mattered. So if you're talking about some business process that might be confidential, if you're talking about some intellectual property things, [00:04:00] right which is confidential business information. If you're talking about banking information if you're talking to your accountant if you're talking about anything. That could be used by hackers or the Nation States. Anybody malicious doesn't use Zoom. Now I get it. I understand why people used it. I have used zoom and I'm probably still going to continue to use zoom for certain things. The big advantages to zoom are Number one it's easy to use and set up and manage. It is quite straightforward. Now. Unfortunately, unlike WebEx teams, you do have to install a client. You have to install software on your computer. Guess what? That's another area. Zoom has been caught doing some things that are very, very poor practices from a programming standpoint and the nefarious if you want to look at this through a slightly different lens when it comes to Mac computers, they were installing a whole server [00:05:00] on your computer that allowed remote access to pretty much everything on your computer. Can you believe these guys? OK, it's really crazy, but you know, zoom, you don't need IT team to manage it. You don't need to have somebody like me come in and get everything set up, help explain it to you. Cause there are not very many functions in it. There are not very many features. It's not like a WebEx team, the room, and spaces that can all be tied into other devices and get set up on your mobile devices. Maybe like I have sitting right here, I have this amazing WebEx teams displayed. It's just absolutely amazing. We were using it yesterday for a meeting and it has a built-in whiteboard and I'm just drawing on this screen. It's it is really quite impressive, but. You don't need any of that with Zoom. And that's why so many people went on and used it. And frankly, they've more than doubled in size over the last six months or so. [00:06:00] It's been huge. So with Zoom, you can get up to a hundred participants standard on your Zoom account. You can have a quick one on one meeting, which is handy. You have your own Zoom room. In fact, the Zoom rooms have been where most of the Zoom bombing has been going on, where people drop in and stick pornography in the middle of your meeting. It's been happening for schools. It's been happening for everybody. Who's been using them by the way. If you're a school, don't use Zoom, get something good. Get again, WebEx teams, Hey, listen, we sell it. We use it. We do that because we love it. Believe me. It's just phenomenal. You can have your meetings on Zoom phone webinars, chats on Zoom, which is really kind of handy. They do also have the ability to with browsers attend some of the meetings. They have conference rooms and mobile devices. I really like conference rooms. That's what I used to [00:07:00] run the FBI's InfraGard webinars for a couple of years. It works pretty darn well for that sort of stuff. Zoom also has some of these all in one in appliances, which makes it even simpler to deploy, manage, and scale the room experience. But again, Those all in one appliance have been found to be anything but secure. It's just crazy. These guys, they just don't get it. They either don't know anything about security or they just don't care about it. Right. So these all in one appliance has it been shown from Zoom to be very, very insecure and it's very cheap. It's inexpensive to do it. It does have some integrations with Google and Microsoft. You can use their app marketplaces over 200 integrations with things like Slack and PayPal and many others. In fact, that's what we did with the FBI InfraGard program. We had some that were paid, some of these [00:08:00] meetings that were paid and that went over like a lead balloon. Let me tell you. that was kind of one of the final straws when I left doing that for the FBI InfraGard program, because so much of this information, I'm trying to get it outright. Why should people have to pay for some of these webinars where the presenters are, volunteers, me running the webinars for the FBI InfraGard program, our volunteers, and then they start charging people and then there, they, in a couple of cases, they actually paid behind the scenes, the people who were doing the presentations. But for the most part, they weren't getting paid. Anyway, so I don't know, maybe that's a little inside baseball. Okay. Now, why am I still going to use Zoom? In some cases, Zoom is just what everybody knows. It's what everybody uses. It just makes life so easy.  I think I would probably continue to use it for some people. Some people have a hard time with anything new, but [00:09:00] you know what, now that the majority of people know how to use Zoom, because they've had to, because of working from home. With the coronavirus thing, the Zoom is going to be a platform that's going to be around for quite a while. And yeah, it's got its drawbacks as I just talked about, but the fact that it's kind of ubiquitous, everybody knows that everybody can use it. Everybody has used it. It is not going away anytime soon. So stick around if you missed any of today's show, make sure you go to Craig peterson.com. You'll find it all there as well as on your favorite podcast app and stick around. Cause we're going to talk about my favorite collaboration system when we get back. So, stick around. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Welcome! Craig discusses Microsoft Teams and other collaboration platforms. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: 7 reasons to pay for antivirus software and skip the free versions YouTube TV jumps 30% in price effective immediately Police roll up crime networks in Europe after infiltrating popular encrypted chat app New Mac ransomware is even more sinister than it appears Ransomware is now your biggest online security nightmare. And it's about to get worse Apple's Silicon Macs promise screaming performance TikTok and 32 other iOS apps still snoop your sensitive clipboard data An embattled group of leakers picks up the WikiLeaks mantle --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Well, we went into our first collaboration product and now we're going to get into our next product. And this one is actually more of a team collaboration rather than just a video conferencing setup. Really, as I mentioned, GoToMeeting's been around a long time, man. They'd have its pros and its cons and its pros really have to do with frankly how long it has been around because that makes it. More stable. Right? They've been addressing every problem. They've seen every problem in the last, my gosh, how long has it been for them? 16 years. So Go To Meeting, a very, very stable product, something you might want to consider. I want to move into our next collaboration tool, which is Microsoft teams. Now, most businesses today are [00:01:00] using a whole array of tools. And the reason I bring up Microsoft teams is that so many of us are using what's now called Microsoft three 65. It used to be called office three 65, but now it's Microsoft three 65, which is a little bit misleading because office three 65, depending on which level you were on, gave you access to all of Microsoft office tools and where you could get windows as well, windows licenses, they pull it all under one roof and as would be expected from Microsoft or frankly, almost any company out there. The price has risen and dramatically in some cases. So Microsoft three 65 has some inexpensive offerings we're talking just dollars per month, or if you're an actual business that needs to get something done, [00:02:00] cares about having backups, cares about having an email with the proper email filters in place. And cares to have some of these collaboration tools. Well, now you're in the 30, 40, $50 per person per month range, which is pretty high when you get right down to it. Not out of the ordinary, not just a totally out of the question, but it starts getting much more expensive there, including things like Microsoft windows licenses themselves. So you can really make sure all of your software from Microsoft is up to date and that you have the appropriate licenses for it because many of us, unfortunately, Just just don't have that. Right?  What's one of the reasons that we're not keeping our software up to date. Well, one of the reasons that I've seen, again and again, is that Microsoft charges you in order to get an update in an upgrade. So. [00:03:00] The first little bit of advice here is if you are a business, even as SO/HO, small office home office, make sure you get the enterprise versions of Microsoft three 65. Typically those start with an E and I don't recommend anything less than an E three. And it goes up from there there's three and four and five and there's one and two and stuff. They change it frequently. So who knows this week, right? It might've changed and I didn't notice, but either three is where you want to start and that's going to give you access to all of the basic stuff that you need. Now, typically we'll put a Cisco email firewall in front of Microsoft and their outlook and exchange servers. The reason for that is the Cisco email filters, just so much better than the stuff Microsoft offering. Plus you also can still [00:04:00] use, and you still do use the Microsoft filters, but once they've gone through those incredible Cisco filters, those Microsoft filters, just frankly, don't add up to much, not much at all. So that's what we normally do. But a lot of companies, they just stick with the regular Microsoft stuff. Now I get questions a lot of the time about Google and whether or not they should get to Google because Google has their Gmail, but they also have offerings for businesses. I have mixed feelings on that, but basically I say, no, don't use the Google tools. Google has been decent at security. No question about it better than Microsoft that's for sure. Microsoft security is not their product. Let me tell you, but remember Google's product is you, even if you're paying them. They are watching your emails. They are selling that information and who knows whose hands it ends [00:05:00] up in, even if it's supposedly anonymized. That doesn't mean it's truly anonymous data. That data can be de-anonymized. We talked about that on the show before. So we're talking about Microsoft and if you already have a Microsoft license, like the older office three 65, or the newer licenses that are known as Microsoft three 65. You have the option of getting Microsoft teams and that's what a lot of people have done. They're saying, Hey, listen, we're already using all this Microsoft stuff. We're just going to start using teams. Now I have to give kudos to Microsoft because they have come a long way. Their software was terrible for years, for a decade or more, just terrible. They would put every feature under the sun, into their software. Not that it worked, but people, when they're doing a selection, they're not looking for what they want. They're trying to [00:06:00] eliminate the things they don't want. So if you're a vendor and you have some things missing in the mind of your prospect, You're not going to get that sale. It's just not going to happen. So Microsoft would throw everything, including the kitchen sink into their software. And most of them had a lot of bugs. Now Microsoft still has tons of bugs, still tons. It's crazy. And those bugs drive me nuts. Sometimes it's like the moment we talked about at the top of the show, major, major bug in some of their software, that's supposed to keep your data secure, basically from hard disk crashes and from data loss and in fact is barely done the exact opposite. So I'm not a big Microsoft fan, but they're tools that they've been developing more recently for online news. Have been a lot better than anything they've had before. I guess that's faint praise, right? [00:07:00] Because what they had before was just so terrible, but anyhow, Microsoft has their teams app. A lot of businesses that are already using Microsoft have said, well, we'll just use their Teams because you know, it's Microsoft and that's the employee they have used since day one, they tried to build up a name for themselves. They destroyed competitors by having people just waiting because they knew Microsoft is going to come up with something. So we'll just wait and see because Microsoft announced something that not only did they not have in development, but apparently. We're barely even thinking about and just trying to put the competitors out of business and test the marketplace. Right? That's what it is. So where are you using this business today? A whole bunch of different tools for communication and collaboration and Microsoft teams. It might be something not just for your business, but if you have a nonprofit or small family business, something you might want to [00:08:00] look at. Because teams are designed to be collaborative and it does tie in a lot of Microsoft's other tools. It allows you to deploy it company-wide and that can help to bring together employees. Now it can also make it so that your employees can't get anything done because they're constantly getting notes and messages from other employees, but if your employees get some decent training and you kind of help them out that overload that can come with some of these teams tools, can basically go away. So here are a few different ways that using a team tool could help out your business. One company-wide chat, which is kind of handy. It helps you to get your overall company message into the hands of all your employees. That's a very good thing. And that chat functionality is one of the main value adds of a team's application [00:09:00] over something like Slack, that designed more for some typing back and forth. Or some of these other things like Go to meeting or Zoom that are designed primarily for you to hold a meeting. All of the team's apps, Microsoft, and WebEx, both have. What's called threaded conversations. Now you'll see that in Slack where someone will make a comment in a channel, and then you can have a thread off of that comment. So that people that are looking through the channel or space or whatever it's called on the software you're using, don't have to see all of the comments about some main item that's in there. So threads that's important to have and Microsoft and WebEx teams both have that. Everything's recorded in one easy to find a place so that all of your conversations are right there in the channel. You know what they are, and you can find [ 00:10:00] them. A WebEx team recently has set it up so that, yeah, everything is right there in that space, but it also has a separate set of tabs that let you look at just the files that were uploaded or just the meetings that took place in that space. I love that about WebEx. There's no more digging through your inbox, looking for emails, or just all of a sudden there are 50 emails that come in because everybody had a comment on an email that somebody else sent. So you don't get that mail bomb when you're using these teams' apps. And that helps a lot making a, you know, a filter because we're so overloaded in all of our lives. Now, your conversations in these team apps can take place as a team discussion, or you could have private chats or private meetings. It really, this changes everything. If you haven't used either Microsoft teams or WebEx teams, [00:11:00] and there's the ability to integrate Skype, to have audio and video conversations. That's true in Microsoft teams. If you're using WebEx teams, you have much better options. And we'll talk about those in, an upcoming segment here. let's see, I think the next segment. Yeah. Next segment. We're going to finish up a discussion about Microsoft teams. There are still a few more things we need to talk about. We're going to also get into Zooms pros and cons. What can you use Zoom for? Why did I use Zoom? I still use it. And why? Both for marketing and for business and for family. So we'll talk about all of that and some other options that are out there that Google has.  Also, Apple has some just amazing things. What you can use to communicate securely and privately all of that right here and online@craigpeterson.com. Stick around. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553